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ON THE 

PRINCIPLES AND ENDS 

OF 

PHILOSOPHY, 

COMPREHENDING 

AN EXAMINATION 

OF THE 

SYSTEMS WHICH NOW PREVAIL, 

AND 

A DETAIL OF THE ERRONEOUS PRINCIPLES ON WHICH 

THEY ARE FOUNDED, AND OF THE EVILS TO 

WHICH THEY TEND. 



,-^6 BY 

RICHARD SAUMAREZ, Esq. 

F. R. C. C. 

LONDON: 

PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR, 

AND SOLD BY E. COX, ST. THOMAS'S STREET, BOROUGH j 

T. EGERTON, CHARING CROSS; AND J. JOHNSON, ST. PAUL'S 
CHURCH YARD. 

1811. 



n 







Fage 7 Line 17 instead of minors read minnows. 

12 of the note insert period after the word that. 

16 Line 10, for connect read convert. 

18 Line 9, after particular add a semicolon ;— 

40 Last line but one, instead of millionth part read one million times 

more. 

55 Line. 5, tot fwictions read sensations. 

58 Line 8, dele pleasure or. 

59 Line 3, after Jife insert to, and after design to. 

60 Line 16, for subsisting read subsist. 

61 Line 3, for divisibly read things divisible. 
66 Line 9, for philosophers read philosophes . 
77 Line 31, dele first word Jess. 

135 Last line, for member read members. 

165 Note at the last word of the page beginning May, to be trass* 

posed to page 87. 

174 Head of chapter, read organic lile. 

189 Line 11, us it possessed read that. 

2.07 Last line but one, for specifi.ee read specific, &c. 6rc. 




CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 
On the Principles of Physical Science* 



CHAPTER II. 
On the Nature and Properties of Matter in general • • • • 25 

CHAPTER III. 

On the Relation which Matter bears to the Organs of Sense, 
comprehending the Nature and Cause of Sensation 
and the objects of it • • 55 

CHAPTER IV. 

On the Power of the Principle of Life and its Relation to 
Matter; comprehending the Nature and Attributes of 
the Mind • 71. 

CHAPTER V. 
On the Evolution of the Principle of Life, and the End or 

Final Cause for which different Beings were created • • 89 

CHAPTER VI. 

On the Means by which Individuals attain the End or Final 

cause of their Existence •«••••••••« • 1 43 



11 CONTENTS* 

CHAPTER VII. 

On the Physiology of Organic Life, comprehending the 
Functions of the Organs as the Instruments which are 
employed toattain those ends ....«♦. J 75 



PREFACE 



NOTWITHSTANDING the boasted asser- 
tions which are generally made, of the high de- 
gree of perfection which in these latter days the 
different branches of philosophy are supposed 
to have attained; it will, I fear, upon a fair en- 
quiry be found, that we continue in the very 
infancy of our knowledge: that, with the ex- 
ception of mathematical truths, and of those 
arts which are founded on mathematical prin- 
ciples, there subsists scarcely one subject either 
of physics, of metaphysics, or of physio- 
logy, the science of which is clearly un- 
derstood, as to the truth of which an uni- 
formity of opinion subsists. The essential at- 
tributes which different bodies possess, and the 
first and most simple elements of which they are 
composed, and the definitions by which those 
elements are characterized, continue to natural 

philosophers 



11 

philosophers points of constant controversy and 
disputation. 

If we extend our views from the primary and 
essential, to the secondary and accidental qua- 
lities of matter, to the last and most trifling branch 
of natural philosophy, to which the province of 
chemistry more especially belongs ; we shall find 
that although chemistry has occupied the 
thoughts of, and been pursued with zeal the most 
ardent by a great number of learned and en- 
lightened men in every part of Europe, that we 
notwithstanding continue completely ignorant 
of the principles on which chemistry, as a 
science, is founded. 

Without previous design, or by mere chance, 
as it may be called, we have, it is true, discover- 
ed, that when different substances, such as acids 
and alcalies, for example, are brought in contact, 
that an union between them takes place ; we are 
by experience taught, that different bodies have 
a stronger disposition to unite together, to the 
exclusion of others with which they may have 

been . 



Ill 

been combined; of the cause why these sepa- 
rations are produced and new combinations 
formed— on what principle the doctrine of elec- 
tive attraction, or chemical affinity is founded, 
we are totally ignorant. 

By the Researches of Professor Davy, in the 
art of chemistry, a multitude of opinions, which 
by chemists had been received as fundamental 
truths, have been overturned and exposed: he 
has proved that a great portion of the chemical 
knowledge, not only of former times, but of the 
present day, is erroneous in some of its most 
essential points ; and it is now become a com- 
mon observation amongst our best chemists, 
that in consequence of these new discoveries, 
chemists will be probably obliged to trace back 
the road of error which they have so long tra- 
versed, in order to learn afresh the first princi- 
ples of their art.* 

* The Monthly Marine for the present month very justly 
observes, " that Dr. Davy's Chemical Lectuies shew that stu- 
dents in chemistry have to unlearn most of what they have re- 
ceived as authority in that science. It may be hoped therefore 

it 



It is greatly to be lamented that the pursuits 
of the chemists, instead of being confined to their 
proper objects — to the examination of the qua- 
lities of matter dead and common — have been 
equally but improperly directed and extended 
to the investigation of living matter also ; hoping 
thereby to explore the causes of animation and 
of vital action from chemical phenomena, the 
inevitable attributes of decomposition and de- 
cay.* 

It has been with this vain expectation that 
every solid and fluid of which vegetables and 
animals are composed have been analysed with 
the most accurate nicety ; and effects attempted 
to be explained from the result of decomposition 
and of death, which altogether depend on vita- 
lity and animation. To this total inversion of all 

that we shall have no other voluminous systems of this variable 
science, till its elementary principles are somewhat better 
settled." 

* In deprecating as I do experiments, it is proper that I 
should he clearly understood. I deprecate the application of 
chemistry to physiology, as much as I would deprecate the prac- 
tice of employing the phenomena of death in order to explain 

principles 



principle with respect to the relation which ex- 
ists between things external to the animated 
system, and the animated system itself, is to 
be ascribed, the absolute ignorance which pre- 
vails, not only of the function of digestion, but 
of the operation of medicine also ; not only of 
every organ, but of every fluid of which the 
system is composed. Until physiologists are 
made to feel that physiology is still an art, not 
a science; and pathologists that the practice of 
medicine is altogether empirical; untill the 
state of eiTor and of ignorance which exists is 
truly and fairly represented, 1 see no hopes 
whatever of improvement or of reformation. 

the actions of life; and more especially I deprecate the experi- 
ments made on different organs and fluids of the living system, 
because the natural and healthy functions of a part can never 
be ascertained through the medium of mutilation or extirpa- 
tion ; but with respect lo the investigation of matter dead and 
common, experiment alone is the medium through which its 
properties and attributes can be attained. I think it proper to 
give this explanation in order that I may not have it thrown 
in my teeth that I reprobate experimental philosophy in gene- 
ral, the odium of which I am persuaded would otherwise be at- 
tempted to be fixed on me. 

Much 



VI 

Much as there is to deplore with respect to 
the application of physiology to practice, it 
is as a feather in the balance, when compared to 
the relation which it is supposed to bear to 
metaphysics. Instead of tracing the relation 
which the different organs bear to each other, 
as the means that are employed with a view to 
ends; instead of exploring the nature of life, 
and more especially of intellect or of soul, — of 
that principle by which man is more especially 
characterized from every other animal, and by the 
proper exercise of which he is able to abstract him- 
self from matter and from sense ; it is to the at- 
tributes of matter alone, impelled by sensible 
objects, to which the existence of mind is gene- 
rally ascribed, and the doctrine of materialism, 
in its fullest extent, attempted to be established. 

Although the doctrine of materialism is not 
proclaimed in our philosophical schools in word, 
I will maintain that it is so indeed. I will main- 
tain that the existence of any immaterial or 
spiritual principle, is seldom, if ever, so much as 
mentioned,much less employ ed as constituting the 

cause 



Vll 

cause of organization or of intellection ; on the con- 
trary that it is to the organization alone, and to the 
matter of which that organization is composed, 
that the principles of life and of mind, as 
effects, are immediately referred. This evil 
spirit, if it dared, would even manifest itself 
within the bosom of our universities.— Within the 
last few months two members belonging to 
one of the principal colleges in Oxford, publish- 
ed a book entitled " The Necessity of Atheism" 
and they even had the audacity to attempt a de- 
fence of the principles it contained, before a con- 
vocation appointed to examine them: these mis- 
guided men have been very properly expelled 
from the university, and the wretched trash 
which they had written has been suppressed.* 

It has been the object of my most particular 
solicitude to expose the errors of such pursuits, 

* I think it right to mention this fact as an illustration, more 
than as a proof, of the truth of my assertions. Whatever blame 
might formerly be imputed to the laxity of University morals, or 
University discipline, has been corrected, and the system of edu- 
cation now pursued bids fair to answer the end for which it was 
originally designed. 

and 



Vlll 



and to point out the evils to which they lead ; 
to shew that such a system, instead of leading 
to truth, not only recedes from it, but perpe- 
tuates and establishes what is infinitely worse 
than ignorance —erroneous principles: that in- 
stead of exploring the essential properties of 
matter with relation to the system of order and 
subordination which exists throughout the whole 
system of nature, secondary qualities alone 
obtained by artificial means, are the objects of 
our present pursuits: instead of contemplating 
the attributes of the Creator from the works of 
Creation, it is through the medium of unnatural 
phenomena alone, that natural phsenomena 
are attempted to be explained. I complain 
that the present system of what is called phi- 
losophy, is an artificial not a natural one; and 
that the very first dictum, or aphorism, pro- 
claimed by Lord Bacon in his Novum Organum, 
is altogether violated by our philosophers. — 
" Homo Natura minister et interpres, tan turn 
facit & intelligit, quantum de naturae ordine, re- 
vel mente observaverit ; nee amplius scit aut 
potest" 

I corn- 



IX 

I complain that instead of making (as true 
philosophy must ever tend to do), man religious ; 
it is at variance with religion, and deprives 
him of the benefit and of the comforts which reli- 
gion is calculated to bestow : that instead of 
leading man to God, it estranges God from man, 
and separates, to the utmost possible distance, 
(if I may be allowed the expression), the soul 
from the Deity. In proof of my assertions, I 
would appeal to the notorious neglect of pub- 
lic worship by those who consider themselves 
what the French call philosophes, as well as by 
a great proportion of professional men who 
are considered to possess, in the highest degree, 
the philosophy or the* science of the profession. 

By them I am persuaded, I shall be viewed 
with derision and with scorn for having entered 
upon the subject of theology. I am, however, 
willing to suffer their reproach* with the hope 
that to others it may call to their recollection 
one of the principal ends for which they were 
created. 

With 



With respect to the chapter on Organic Life, 
or the means by which those ends are attained, 
it is for the most part a mere syllabus of my 
system of Physiology.* 



* It was first written with a view of exposing the folly and 
errors of the Brunonian doctrine, which was at that time in ge- 
neral estimation in this country, as it still continues to be over 
different parts of the continent. It is not likely that any sys- 
tem of physiology which took for its principle the power of life 
and the aptitude of matter — which traced the phaenomena of 
vitality from organization to action, and investigated the par- 
ticular organs as the instruments by which ends were obtain- 
ed, would be very well received by those who begin with death, 
and who end with life. Notwithstanding the new opinions which 
it proclaimed it was generally well spoken of, and by the medical 
Review it was observed, " that in the execution of the extensive 
work before us, Mr. Saumarez is in many parts original ; it is 
however but justice to add, that a? passion for novelty does not 
appear to have led him to a hasty adoption of opinions on slight 
or trivial grounds. His arguments are in general well support- 
ed and his conclusions cautiously deduced. As a whole, it, 
certainly bespeaks the industry and genius of a writer who dares 
to think for himself, unfettered by prejudice and authority, &c." 
again, " we are not sorry to see the errors of the Brunonian 
system thus combated by an able champion ; it happens with 
this theory, more than with any former one, that its errors are 
not merely speculative, but lead to the greatest possible mistakes. 
Indeed it would be no easy matter to calculate the mischief 
which it has occasioned in the hands of young and inexperienced 
practitioners; but when we find, from Dr. Beddoes himself, the 
translator, its ascendency over men's miflds in different parts 

Before 



xi 

Before I conclude I may perhaps be permit- 
ted to say a few words of myself. Although 
incessantly employed in the discharge of the 
duties of my profession, it will not be imputed 
to me that I neglect any opportunity to acquire 
whatever information in it which is to be ob- 
tained. I acknowledge with thanks my obliga- 
tion to those who supply me with new facts, 
although I feel myself compelled to deny the 
conclusions which are often deduced from them. 
I deplore, as every professional man must do, 
the imperfect state of medical knowledge, and 
the little improvement which medical science 
has undergone. It is from a firm persuasion that the 
present system is radically wrong that 1 have ven- 
tured to point out some of its errors. Many 
of my brethren, for whom I entertain the greatest 
friendship, will, I fear, reprobate my conduct 
in disclosing " the secrets of the prison house," 
and proclaiming to the world truths which 



of Europe, and that in the celebrated University of Pavia, there 
is hardly a student endowed with talents who is not a Brunonian, 
it is surely high time to examine its principles and refute its 
errors, &c. &c, 

many 



Xll 



many of them will think ought to be concealed. 
I nevertheless feel that my motives are beyond 
the reach of impeachment, and that the igno- 
rance which I impute to them I acknowledge to 
participate myself. In the sincere hope that I 
may do some good in correcting much error, 
and more especially that I may be instrumental 
in diverting some of the younger part of the pro- 
fession from the system of materialism, to which 
the science of physiology at present unques- 
tionably tends, I am willing to bear the criti- 
cism and derision which I must expect. I have 
no private motives to answer ; I have only in 
view the general good. The facts which 1 have 
assumed for principles, and the conclusions 
which I have deduced from them are fair ob- 
jects of animadversion. I have made the at- 
tack and shall be ready to enter upon my de- 
fence: I nevertheless have to request indulgence 
from the reader, not only for the hurried style 
evident in many parts, but for many verbal and 
typographical errors, which often obscure the 
meaning ; the most material of these will be cor- 
rected in the leaf of errata at the beginning of the 

book 



Xlll 

book. It is now my intention to proceed with 
the second part of the subject, and to give the 
physical or natural history of common matter: 
it will not be so much my object to add new 
facts to old principles, as to give new principles 
to old facts.* 

I shall endeavour to prove that the matter of 
fire, instead of being simple and elementary is 
compounded and factitious ; instead of according 
to the Newtonian hypothesis of light and colours 
viz. that the colour of a body proceeds from the 
rays which are repelled, and not absorbed, I 
shall show that the colour of every body pro- 
ceeds from the matter of light having united with 
the body from whence it is reflected and by 
becoming tinged and dyed with it, the colour- 
ing matter is conveyed to the eyes; and that 
black and white instead of being negatives or 
non-entities, are as absolute and positive as any 
other colours that exist, and that it is by the 



* It may be proper to observe to the unscientific reader that 
the word physics does not mean medical but natural, and when 
I speak of the physical proportion of bodies, I mean those that 
are natural and essential, not such as are ?ncdicinaL 

other 



XIV 



union of the solar rays with atmospheric matter 
that the different prismatic colours for the most 
part are produced. That the solar matter, as 
far as we have any cognisance of it, is altogether 
different in its nature from any matter belonging 
to our mundane system, that it is destitute of fire 
and colour altogether, but possesses the essen- 
tial attributes alone of transparency and motion; 
that instead of having gravity or weight, it moves 
with the most incredible velocity in every direc- 
tion, in opposition to the laws of gravitation, 
which to the sun are so hypothetically ascribed ; 
that the hypothesis which concludes that the 
sun is a gravitating body, attracting by its gra- 
vitating matter the whole of the planetary sys- 
tem, is founded on false assumptions, not only 
without proof but contrary to proof. That it is 
by the energy which is imparted to different 
bodies by the solar rays, that the processes of 
vaporization and gasification are carried on in a 
natural state; that the essential properties of 
every gas is that of expansibility, by which it 
dilates and expands in every direction from a 
centre to a circumference; that the weight which 
is ascribed to gaseous matter is an artificial not 

a na- 



XV 

a natural property ; and that the degree of ex- 
pansibility not of weight is the standard by which 
its powers ought to be meted or measured; and 
I shall shew by the most simple, and yet the 
most decisive experiments, that the elevation of 
the mercury in the torricellian tube, as well as 
other fluids in exhausting pumps, are not caused 
by the weight or gravity of the atmosphere, and 
consequently that the term Barometer, so uni- 
versally employed is an erroneous one. 

I shall endeavour to shew that although wa- 
ter forms one of the constituent materials of which 
gases are composed; that gases are nevertheless 
not the constituent materials alone, of which 
water is formed, that although it is frequently 
decomposed and deposited out of them, it is 

* When I first began this book I merely intended to confine 
myself to this part of the subject; I however found, as I went 
on, that the different branches of physical knowledge are so in- 
timately woven with each other, that it is difficult to understand 
any one point properly without some knowledge of the whole. 
I found it necessary, for example, to distinguish mere capacity, 
or passivity from flexibility ; flexibility from elasticity; and finally 
elasticity itself from expansibility, subsisting as an inherent power. 
This explanation will, I hope, excuse me for the arrangement 
in one part being somewhat different from what I should other- 
wise have made. 

not 



XVI 

not caused by them ; and finally that gravity, 
gravitation, or weight, is a relative, not a posi- 
tive or absolute term ; that the gravity or weight 
of a body altogether depends on the nature of 
the medium in which it is placed; that instead 
of extending beyond, is altogether confined to 
it. I hope therefore to shew, that the ipse dixit 
of Sir I. Newton, which constitutes his fourth 
law of nature, is altogether unfounded, viz. that 
allbodiesaremutually heavy and gravitate towards 
each other; that this gravity is 'proportionate to 
the quantity of matter \ and at unequal distances 
is inverstely as the squares of the distances" 
Although I am nearly prepared, I nevertheless 
think it more prudent to delay publishing this 
second part until the present one has gone 
through the ordeal which it must suffer. I have 
only to add that, whilst on the one hand I 
shall feel grateful and thankful for fair and 
liberal criticism, I shall however be ready to re- 
pel, and to give the " retort courteous," to those 
who impatient of contradiction, consider any in- 
novation in long established systems as deserving 
of condemnation, however contrary to common 
sense they may be demonstratively proved. 



CHAPTER I 



3N T THE PRINCIPLES OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 



JlN order to prosecute to a successful termina- 
tion any branch of science, it is of the utmost im- 
portance, that we should be in full possession 
of the first principles on which that science de- 
pends, as causes from whence the effects pro- 
ceed, and that the definitions employed should 
be determinate and precise, expressive of the 
thing signified. * This previous and antecedent 
knowledge not only comprehends the existence 
of the subject itself, and the terms by which its 

b existence 



2 

existence is known ; as that a human being is a 
a biped, a horse a quadruped, &c. but the various 
attributes belonging to it ; these attributes are 
either inherent and essential, or accidental and 
transient : these by some have been called ac- 
cidents, by others secondary qualities. If the 
nature of them were examined it would be found 
that they owe their existence more to the agency 
of external things than to any property resident 
within them. It is not from the accidental colour 
of the skin which different beings possess, whe- 
ther pallid or red, by which the species in gene- 
ral is characterized. The external colour may 
be imitated by art on a lump of clay, or a block 
of wood, upon a dead almost as perfectly as on 
a living subject. It is to those permanent and 
indelible attributes of organization and of form 
of action, and of power, by which every indivi- 
dual is known to be what it really is, and 
through which it is distinguished from every 
thing else. 

Such was the state of barbarism and ignorance 
which filled the human mind for more than a thou- 
sand 



Tw-|^,. - l 



sand years, and which has been in consequence de- 
nominated the period of the dark ages, that know- 
ledge, if knowledge it maybe called, was confined 
to the schoolmen : the erroneous practice in gene- 
ral, at that period, of reasoning without facts, 
and drawing conclusions from false principles, 
became at length apparent to that great lumi- 
nary of our country, Lord Bacon. 

The accumulation of error was at that time 
too extensive to be corrected by any individual, 
however mighty in intellect he might be sup- 
posed. Instead of unravelling the gordian knot 
he cut it. Instead of amusing himself with 
solving the most absurd and ridiculous proposi- 
tions that can be conceived; with calculating, 
for example, how many millions of angels could 
dance upon the point of a needle, he determin- 
ed to accumulate facts only, before he gene- 
ralized them, and the art of induction was rais- 
ed on the ruins of false syllogism. 

It is greatly to be deplored that the plan which 
he himself pursued, has not been adhered to by 

b 2 his 



his followers in general; that attention is not 
so much paid to the simple observation of na- 
tural phenomena as to those which are the re- 
sults of sophisticated experiments. I do not 
decry experiments in general, it is the abuse not the 
use of them which I reprobate and condemn. 
It is through the agency of experiment that the 
useful arts have obtained such a high degree of 
elegance and perfection; that chemistry, and 
what is called experimental philosophy, in gene- 
ral, are in a constant state of improvement, and 
that the certainty of many uncertain things is 
ascertained. Let it not, however, be supposed 
that it is the result of experiment alone on which 
the whole of our knowledge depends, or that it 
was so considered by Lord Bacon himself; he 
expressly ranks natural history to be the result 
of simple observation, and classes it before ex- 
perimental history. He considered it to be the . 
iirst means which ought to be employed to ac- 
complish the grand instauration, as he calls it, 
which he had in view ; from induction, through 
the medium of analysis, to establish principles; 
from the individual to form the species, and from 

the 



the species the genus ; from history by analysis 
to obtain definitions, and proceeding from effects 
to arrive at causes. 

Had he been desirous to appeal to experiment 
alone, he would have excluded the facts which 
are the result of simple observation only ; if such 
had been his principles of learning it would have 
led, as it has been well observed, to the unwar- 
rantable length of supposing that knowledge 
could only be obtained through an artificial, rather 
than through a natural channel, assisted by the 
furnace and the crucible in the laboratory, to 
make no use of our eyes unless with a candle 
in our hands and spectacles on our nose, and 
forced to withdraw our senses from the know- 
ledge which they convey to the mind of the uu- 
disturbed appearances of nature. 

Instead however of appealing to simple ob- 
servation for the apprehension of natural pheno- 
mena, few phenomena are at this time supposed 
or admitted to be true, unless proved by the 
test of experiment; unnatural effects generally 

r 3 preferred 



6 

preferred before such as are natural and unso* 
phisticated. The phenomena of disease are ad- 
duced to explain the actions of health ; the che- 
mical changes which dead and common matter 
undergo are often assumed in order to account 
for the causes and phenomena of life. 

The error of endeavouring to account by 
chemical, by hydraulic, and other mechanical 
principles, for the phenomena of vital action, as 
well as the principle of vitality itself, may be 
assigned as the reason for the barbarous state 
which physiology is in at the present day. 

To the late Mr. J. Hunter, to Dr. Goodwin, 
Spallanzani, and a few others we are eminently 
indebted for many valuable facts obtained 
through the medium of experiment performed on 
living animals : these facts acquire their intrin- 
sic worth, in consequence of exposing to our 
view internal operations, which were before con- 
cealed, and thereby manifesting the natural con- 
dition of things without altering it. 

Cruel 



Cruel and horrible as were these experiments 
if they cannot be justified it is hoped that they 
will find considerable palliation in the motive 
which led to the execution of them ; — the earnest 
hope which a few of these gentlemen entertain- 
ed of bringing light out of darkness, and that 
the sufferings of the brute might ultimately 
prove beneficial to man. 

Although humanity feels a pang at the re- 
collection of such pursuits, they ought never- 
thelss to be tolerated to a certain degree, when 
performed by those who having an end in view, 
are anxious to prove, by the fact of experiment, 
the truth or error of the principles of physiolo- 
gical science, which they may entertain. 

To that numerous class of pretenders to phy- 
siology, to those minpws in science, who with- 
out end or design, are impelled by blind chance 
and mere curiosity to inflict the most barbarous 
cruelties in cold blood on warm blooded animals, 
there is no excuse; more than for those who 
mutilate and extirpate different organs out of 

b 4 the 



a 

the living system, in order to ascertain the na-^ 

tural functions which those organs are intended 

to perform, and the use which they are intend-* 
ed to serve. I do not mean in other points to 

depreciate the merit of many of those gentler 

men; I value it because in many respects they 

are entitled to praise. 

When I hear, however, some of them arrogate 
the claim of furnishing to the world all the phy^ 
siological knowledge in it, and as if alone 
qualified to discuss a physiological question, 
receiving with slight, and considering as mere 
drivellers those who take natural rather than aiv 
tificial phenomena, and whom they call, as a 
mark of contempt, closet philosopher, I confess 
to feel amused with the folly of such conceits. 

In order to appreciate the whole merit to 
which they are entitled, it ought to be examin- 
ed, and I am persuaded it will be found that 
the reason of this conceit and pride arises in 
consequence of mistaking art for science, the 
man who carries the hod for the architect who 

designs, 



9 

designs, and confounding the labourer and 
bellows-blower with the physiologist and meta- 
physician, 

I do not include the man who from a supe-r 
riority of intellect, possesses a knowledge of 
cause, foresees and foreknows the effects which 
will inevitably follow, and is nevertheless anxious 
to put his science to the test, and to prove the 
truth of it by experiment. A philosopher such 
as this is seldom qualified for the task of per- 
forming it, he rather delegates the execution of 
it to others than perform it himself. What 
are the qualifications, I would ask, which 
are requisite for the experimentalist in chemis 
try, who is Ho accomplish the trial? There is 
not, I am persuaded, an experienced artist in 
any of our manufactories, who is not able to 
mix the different ingredients which are intend- 
ed to be employed, to blow the. bellows, and 
even to decide on the result that ensues, as well 
as the best chemist that has ever existed. 



The 



10 

The same limited means are alone wanting 
in physiology ; there is not a lad of twenty years 
of age, who comes from the country to any of 
our hospitals in town, and who after passing 
with common industry two seasons in any of 
our anatomical schools, is not perfectly com- 
petent to perform any physiological experiments; 
in addition to a precise knowledge of position, 
the only requisites wanting are a steady hand, a 
sharp knife, a tolerable good pair of eyes, and 
an unfeeling heart. 

To rip open the flanks of a dog as well as of a 
calf, to drag any particular organ out of its situation, 
to paw and to squeeze it, to decide whether it swells 
or contracts, whether it causes presure or not on 
surrounding parts, to tie a ligature upon the 
vessels or tubes with which any organ is sup- 
plied, or to extirpate the organ altogether, and 
finally cut the animals throat and strip the skin 
for the sake of the leather, can, I am persuaded 
be performed as perfectly by any carcase but- 
cher in any slaughter house, as by the generali- 
ty of physiologists ; and 1 am of opinion that 

the 



11 

the execution of a job such as this, which is 
performed in less than an hour's time, which re- 
quires neither genius, judgement, or skill, would 
be most amply remunerated by the receipt of 
one shilling, and perhaps a pint of small beer as 
an act of generosity.* 

* In order to justify myself from exaggeration, and to enable 
the reader to decide for himself, how far I am justified in 
saying that the degrees of talent necessary to perform an experi- 
ment are very trifling, and that it is generally done with a degree 
pf qold blooded apathy which is shocking to humanity, I shall 
relate one, amongst a multitude of similar experiments, that 
were made on living dogs, in order to ascertain the change of 
colour which the blood underwent during the process of inspira- 
tion. " I procured several large dogs," says one of the gentle- 
men, " and after removing the sternum or breast bone of each, and 
exposing to view the trunks of thepulmonary arteries and veins, &c. 
&c." by another, and he by far the most eminent of all, after 
going through the preliminary operation of cutting the parie- 
tcs of the thorax, and sawing the ribs, and exposing to view the 
organs which it contains, says " I have repeated this experiment 
several times upon several animals, and commonly for half an 
hour at a lime; which was sufficient to allow me to make my 
observations with coolness and accuracy; it was curious to see 
in the first part of the experiment, the coronary arteries turn 
barker and darker; but on blowing air into the lungs the blood 
gradually resumed the florid red. 1 cut and sliced offa piece from 
the lungs, and found that the colour of the blood which came 
from the wound corresponded with the above effect." 

Men 



12 

Men such as these, however qualified they 
may be to act well, seldom think correctly. If 
I were to go into particulars, I could easily 
prove that the premises which they assume con- 
sisting for the most part of the mutilated and un- 
natural condition of things, can seldom convey 
to the mind data fit for physiological science; 
that the conclusions which they draw, however 
true they may be from the principles, are most er- 

I should not have dwelt upon this subject, had I not known 
that the piactice of torturing animals amongst young men is be- 
come of late very much the fashion ; such are the tender mercies 
which they have for themselves; and in order to prevent the poor 
creatures from the onty consolation left them, of expressing, by 
their cries, the anguish which they suffer, they first begin by cutting 
and 'dividing the nerves which subserve to the motion of the 
tongue and lower jaw, and by that means prevent the animal 
from howling. 



This piece of humanity is exactly analogous to that which 
Santerre possessed : during the massacrees in Paris, in theeariy part 
of the French revolution; at that he was commanding officer of the 
national guard, and it was in his power to have prevented the multi- 
tude of beings from being sacrificed ; he however remained quietly 
at table whilst innocent blood flowed in torrents: one of his 
satellites, by accident, put his foot on the tail of a little dog 
situated under the table, which occasioned the dog to squeak, 
Santerre in great agony reproached with bitterness the inhuma- 
nity and cruelty of the fellow for making the poor animal suffer. 

neous 



13 

roneousin themselves, so far as relates to the thing 
which they are intended to explain. 

The system of induction introduced by Lord 
Bacon, had not for its end, as many of his un- 
worthy followers have supposed, the mere ab- 
stract accumulation of facts; facts, isolated and 
unconnected, resemble the rough and raw r ma- 
terials which may be intended for the founda- 
tion of the most magnificent edifice; it is not 
however the carpenter who chips the timber, or 
mason who scrubs the roughness of the marble 
and gives it a polish, who are to be considered 
as the men of science, but him alone who from 
precise knowledge of principles and of jscJesefc, 
is able to direct those materials to be arranged 
with symmetry into order and form. 

Had his lordship limited his views to induc- 
tion only, or had he cherished an hope through 
a multitude of forced and unnatural effects, that 
he would ever be able to establish true principles 
of science, instead of being the father of true 

philosophy, 



14 

philosophy, as he has been called i he would 
have been its greatest enemy* 

In the analysis of facts which are intended 
to constitute the principles of any science, 
it is of the first importance that none should 
be admitted but such as are scientifically effici- 
ent of the conclusion; that we should separate 
partial from* general facts, accidental and tran- 
scient attributes from those that are permanent 
and essential. It is by a process such as this 
that we become possessed of those individual 
facts which form the base and the source of every 
science, the immediate and proximate cause 
from whence effects are derived. It is by the 
enumeration of these attributes, which always 
abiding in the subject to which they belong, 
apply universally to every individual of the 
species, characterise its nature, and distin- 
guish it from a body belonging to every other 
class : w ithout the full possession of these per- 
manent and universal facts, a general, not a par- 
ticular knowledge, of any subject can ever be 
obtained : without history we can never have de- 
finition, 



15 

finition, and without axiom there can be no 
science. 

It is from principles such as these, of self 
evident truth, on which the whole mathema- 
tical science is founded, as well as every other 
branch which deserves the name of science. 
Without the possession of these first principles 
it has ever appeared to me impossible that 
we can obtain any science of the phenomena 
which are produced; without them a general, 
not a particular knowledge may be acquired; 
we may become historians but not philosophers, 
good artists but not men of science : knowledge 
properly so called, does not simply consist in 
the impressions made on the senses by the ope- 
ration of external phenomena ; true knowledge 
can only be admitted to exist when we are in 
full possession of the cause from whence the ef- 
fects are derived, and he alone can be denomi- 
nated the man of science, who is able to connect 
the cause and the effect together. 

These 



16 

These principles are not only more powerful 
and true than the thing produced, but the actual 
cause of its production : they possess the power 
of imparting their own efficacy and energy to the 
bodies on which they operate, and constitute the 
science from whence secondary effects are made 
to flow; by which the principles of life, for ex- 
ample, which is resident in the semina of plants, 
or in the ova of animals, is enabled to act on 
matter dead and common, and to con£e#t it to 
a living state, by which the sun, as the principle 
and fountain of light becomes the primary cause 
of illumination in general ; by which the expan- 
sibility of air is enabled to excite motion in 
matter passive and inert. In every instance 
it appears to me necessary that no fact whatever 
should be admitted as a principle, but such as is 
scientifically efficient to produce the conclusion, 
so that the effect produced should always cor- 
respond to the nature of the producing cause.* 

* I am not speaking at present of the changes which take 
place in bodies by the agency of chemical means, by which the 
effect produced participates of the nature of the several mate- 
rials which may have been employed j I confine myself at pre- 

Al- 



17 

Although it is unquestionably true that there 
exists several different sciences that may be said 
to belong to one and the same genus, in which 
the principles of the one may be legitimately 
transferred to the other, it is nevertheless very 
seldom the case. Principles of science do not 
emigrate, as migratory birds are in the habit of 
doing, at different seasons, to different countries ; 
individual sciences, for the most parr; have 
belonging to them their own facts and their own 
principles ; the conduct of those who take false 
analogies for the explanation of the same phe- 
nomena, and the principles of dissimilar sciences, 
with a view of accounting for the effects which 
are produced in those to which they have no re- 
lation, cannot be too strongly reprobated and 
condemned. 

If the mere capacity which appertains to dif- 
ferent species of common matter, or even the 
chemical power which it may be supposed to 

sent lo the physical and natural power which different bodies 
possess of acting upon others without being acted upon by 
them. 

c possess, 



18 , 

possess, were employed, as is too often the case, 
in order to account for the cause of vitality, if in 
the animated system, the principles of hydraulics 
were employed to account for the motion of the 
fluids, those of pneumatics for the process of res- 
piration ; in short, if the principles of chemical 
science were advanced in order to prove the na- 
ture of vital action in general, and of ratiocination 
in particular facts or principles, such as these, 
would unquestionably be false. The same con- 
clusions may be made if the principles of vitality 
in plants were adduced to prove the principles of 
instinct in brutes ; or the principles of instinct 
in brutes employed to ascertain the nature of 
intellect in man. Facts such as these, having 
no reference whatever to the particular subject 
which they were intended to demonstrate, and 
being in themselves inefficient and defective to 
prove the conclusion; that is to say, that the 
principle of intellect in man cannot be proved 
by the nature of brutal instinct, more than 
the vitality of plants proved from the chemical 
properties of matter dead and common ; facts 
such as these, when employed as principles, 

must 



19 

must ever be considered as false, and in such a 
case physiology and physics, chemistry and me- 
taphysics would be confounded together. 

The same may be said if the facts which apper- 
tain to vision, were employed io account for the 
cause of hearing, and those of taste by the mouth 
with those which belong to the olfactory sense, 
&c. 

If T proceed from physiological to mechanical 
sciences, the same observations will equally ap- 
ply if the principles of hydraulics were employ- 
ed to account for the effects produced in pneu- 
matics, and even if those of pneumatics were 
advanced to prove the nature of optics, such 
facts would be false ; as false as if we were to 
confound the facts which appertain to time 
with those that belong to place, figures with lines 
and lines with figures, and attempt to prove mag- 
nitude by numbers or numbers by magnitude, 
and confound geometry and arithmetic together; 
it would seem to have been for the express pur- 
pose of guarding against this great error, 
that Sir Isaac Newton, in his universal arithme- 

c 2 tic, 



20 

tic, praises the ancients for not deducing geo- 
metrical conclusions from arithmetical princi- 
ples, and for not confounding geometry and 
arithmetic together. " Each of these sciences,' * 
says he, "possessing principles peculiar to it- 
self, and distinct from other sciences." What 
other construction can these words bear, than 
that he who employs the primary and perma- 
nent facts which constitute the principles, or the 
axioms (as I may call them) of every indivi- 
dual science, in order to account for the effects 
which are produced by the power of the facts 
or principles belonging to another, between 
which there is no analogy whatever takes, false 
facts for his data. False facts may therefore be 
considered facts which are assumed as false 
principles, false causes to which effects are im- 
properly referred: the phrase by the driveller 
will either be misunderstood or by him consi- 
dered as an absurdity; by the ignorant in science, 
as contrary to appearances, but not an absolute 
contradiction, as a paradox but not a non-en- 
tity; by the man of real science the phrase will 
be admitted as legitimate and appropriate, and 

be 



21 

be by him constantly appealed to as the true and 
primary cause of error, and of mistake, not only 
at the beginning but at its end; and he will 
ascribe to false facts the mass of false philoso- 
phy which continues to prevail at this day. 

I have perhaps dwelt longer on this subject 
than was necessary; I was, however, led to it in 
consequence of the complete ignorance which 
the subject appeared to be involved in by those 
who ought, from their situation, to have been bet- 
ter instructed ; the idea of false facts by them was 
not only decried but attempted to be ridiculed. 

Having endeavoured to shew what true prin- 
ciples are, and what false principles are not ; 
I shall now proceed to point out the errors 
of taking false analogies as principles of sci- 
ence: wherever an uniformity of nature and 
of character exists between different bodies 
analogy becomes a legitimate source of induc- 
tion, it is from the analogy which subsists,be- 
tween the phenomena of life and health, of dis- 

c 3 ease 



22 

ease and death in plants, that these may often be 
employed to illustrate the correspondent changes 
which take place in brutes as well as in the hu- 
man species ; and also when a similarity of na- 
ture exists between bodies whose functions are 
the same, however dissimilar they may be in 
structure and appearance. By analogy we pre- 
dicate the same attributes to the gills of fish as 
i to the lungs of the mammalia, to the ovaries of 
a sprat and of a whale, as we do to the ovary 
of a rabbit or of an elephant. And it is be- 
cause geometry defines many of the assumptions 
and suppositions of the science of optics, as 
well as of other sciences that might be stated, 
why analogy between them may often be adr 
mitted. 

Analogy maybe admitted throughout the vari- 
ous species of common matter which exists, 
whose nature and properties are the same, how- 
ever different in appearance they may be ; be- 
tween the capacity of a lump of clay and of a piece 
of flint, between the flexibility of lead and of iron, 
between the elasticity of steel and of whalebone, 

and 



23 

and between the expansibilityof gases in general 
however different. The reason why analogy 
between these different genera is admissible is 
this, that however different their particular 
properties may be, they nevertheless always con- 
tinue to retain the same generic character ; al- 
though the chemical characters of particular 
gases are proved to be totally different from 
others, all however are expansible; the same 
may be said of elastic, and of flexible bodies 
also. 

In bodies such as these Sir Isaac Newton's 
second rule of philosophizing may apply, that 
" of natural effects of the same kind the same 
causes are to be assigned:" It must however 
be very obvious that this rule can never be ap- 
plied to bodies whose nature and properties 
are essentially different from each other, and 
between which no analogy whatever exists. 
It must appear most obvious that no ana- 
logy can exist between bodies whose nature 
and properties are essentially different; and that 

c 4 the 



24 

the predications which belong to one cannot be 
applied to the other. It is not legitimate to make 
analogy between flexible and elastic, more than 
between elastic and expansible bodies; much 
less between matter which is ponderable or 
dark, and such as is imponderable and lumin- 
ous; that is passive and opake, and that which 
is essentially active and transparent; between 
a cloud of dust and the rays of light, between 
the natural obscurity of this globe of earth and 
the illumination and splendor of the sun. 



CHAP. 



CHAPTER II. 



ON THE NATURE AND PROPERTIES OF MATTER 
IN GENERAL. 

XF we were to take a particular review of the 
system of nature we should be led to conclude 
that a regular chain of order and of subordina- 
tion subsists, not only throughout the various 
classes of animated beings it contains, but be- 
tween the different parts of the common matter 
of which it is composed. The analogy which 
subsists between the different links of this 
vast chain is so close, and the gradation so 
imperceptible and easy, that it is often very 
difficult to say at what point the one ends 
and the other begins; what are the precise 

marks 



26 

marks by which some parts of the animal 
kingdom are distinguished from the vegetable, 
some species of the vegetable from the mineral, 
until its final termination into matter the most 
formless and common. 

Great and striking as the similitude may be 
between the parts, there nevertheless subsist 
shades of difference throughout the whole ; in- 
somuch that when the extremes are compared, 
instead of analogy there is a total difference be- 
tween them. 

Owing to the obvious difference in the sensible 
properties which different bodies display, differ- 
ent arrangements of them have been made, and 
the whole of the material world has been classed 
under three different orders, or kingdoms, into 
animal, vegetable, and mineral. 

A generalization such as this, appears to me 
highly objectionable, because extremely defec- 
tive. Instead of comprehending the whole it ex- 
cludes a.part, it excludes that immense and in- 
definite 



27 

definite portion of matter, which, instead of be- 
ing mined and immured within the bowels of 
the earth, subsists for the most part out of it; 
it not only excludes water, and gaseous bodies 
in general, but the whole planetary system in 
particular. 

I shall therefore class the whole system of na- 
ture, as it has been called, and the matter of which 
it is composed under three distinct heads, — of 
common, — of living, — and of dead matter. 

First, By common matter I mean the primitive 
or original materials or elements of which theworld 
is composed ; matter which either has never re- 
ceived the participation of life, or having receiv- 
ed has lost it, and been resolved back into a 
a common state. 

Secondly, By living matter I comprehend the 
various orders of living beings, with which the 
universe is replenished and adorned. 

Thirdly,By dead matter I confine myself to the 
exuviae of animals and of vegetables ; as well as to 



23 

the whole substance of which these beings are 
composed after the actions of life are at an end, and 
the state present known by the appellation of 
death. 

Among the first advances that were made of 
putting confusion into order, of arranging the in- 
finite multitude of individuals to particular 
species, and different species to particular genera, 
may be mentioned the art of analysis. By ana- 
lysis the attributes which individuals in common 
possess, are solved. Classifications of them are 
formed to which those individuals,according to the 
general character and mode of subsistence, may 
easily be referred, as they severally exist in a 
solid, a liquid, or a gaseous state. 

To ascertain the nature of these attributes, 

the relation which they bear to each other, the 

changes which they undergo, and finally to trace 

the phenomena, or effects, to their producing 

causes, constitute the objects which physical 

science is designed to explore, and become the 

true pursuit of a natural philosopher. 

To 



29 

To physiology the province belongs of inves- 
tigating the properties of living matter. To 
physics such as is dead or common. Correspon- 
dent to the difference of character which sub- 
sits in matter dead or common, whether solid, 
liquid, or gaseous, a subdivision in the science 
of physics is made. Geology refers to the solid and 
common matter of which the world is composed. 
Hydrology to liquid, and meteorology to that 
which subsists in a gaseous or aeriform state ; 
and finally, chemistry is designed to examine 
and to ascertain the more intimate and particu- 
lar qualities which each substance possesses, 
and the changes it undergoes by union and com- 
bination; the means employed are those of ana- 
lysis and synthesis. 

It is not my present intention to enter into a 
chemical investigation of the subject, I mean 
more especially to confine myself to an enquiry 
into the essential and individual properties which 
subsist in each, by virtue of which the mechani- 
cal changes which those bodies undergo, are to 
be ascertained. 

Although 



30 

Although their natural properties are obvi- 
ously and sensibly different, and that an infinite 
variety of changes in them are perpetually taking 
place, that the most solid bodies are often liqui- 
fied into a fluid, and subtilized into vapour, that 
vapours are often condensed into a liquid, and 
even into a solid form: in whatever state how- 
ever, these bodies may exist, every particle 
possesses one attribute common to the whole, 
the attribute of extension; extension into length, 
breadth, and thickness. 

If we proceed from this attribute, universal to 
the attributes particular, which different bodies 
possess, we shall find them to be totally differ- 
ent from each other, and that a great diversity 
of changes between them are constantly taking 
place; a distinction ought therefore to be made 
between the natural and unnatural state in which 
any portion of matter exists ; between the 
change which is produced and the cause pro- 
ducing it, between passion (passivity) and ac- 
tion, capacity and power. 



So 



31 

So totally and absolutely inert is the solid mat- 
ter of which the world is composed, that it pos- 
sesses within itself no power by which it can 
act, neither the mass altogether more than the 
smallest particle of sand would alter in form or 
in position, unless it were acted upon by agents 
external to itself. It is in consequence of this 
natural tendency to remain permanently the same, 
that solid matter is said to be imbecil and inert, of- 
fering resistance alone to the action of those bodies 
by which it may be assailed : it is to this natural 
property of solid matter to which the term im- 
mobility ought especially to be applied. 

Whenever solid matter is acted upon and the 
resistance which it opposes is overcome, the 
changes which it is made to undergo perpetual- 
ly wear away, the matter gradually verges from 
the state of activity into which it had been ex- 
cited, into the passive and quiescent state which 
is natural to it : this is the end which invariably 
takes place when one mass of solid matter is 
made to act upon another, the first loses as 
much of its own motion as it imparts to the 

second, 



32 

second, insomuch that the quantity of change 
which is excited in the one, entirely depends 
on the quantity of power communicated from 
the other. This capacity to be acted upon, this 
indifference to motion or rest is called mobility 
and the change which the body undergoes dur- 
ing the transition from one place to another is 
called motion.* 

The effect which is produced by a moving 
power on a solid substance, altogether depends 
on the nature of its construction. If it cracks or 
breaks without yielding it is said tobebrittle,such 
as glass or flint. When a body yields with- 
out cracking it is considered as flexible, this is 
the case with lead, with iron, and with a variety 
of other bodies which it is unnecessary for me 
to detail. 

This capacity to be bent by the agency of ex- 
ternal forces, which particular bodies contain, 

* " It is surprising Mr. Locke should have misapplied, as he 
has done, the term mobility, and confounded capacity and power 
together. Mobility he calls a power to be moved, instead of a 
capacity or aptitude to be moved. In like manner Sir Isaac 
Newton calls it a vis inertia?. 

without 



33 
without possessing any inherent power of un- 
bending themselves, is therefore called flexi- 
bility; or as Dr. Johnson expresses it " the qua- 
lity of admitting to be bent." The nature of 
this capacity to be acted upon is exemplified in 
a common piece of iron or of wood. The particles 
of matter of which these substances are composed 
are unable to resist the power which acts upon 
them. The inferior strata become contracted, 
the upper lengthened, both are distorted and 
bent, and finally if the external force be encreas- 
ed beyond a certain point, the bond of conti- 
nuity between the individual particles, becomes 
separated and the iron or wood snaps or breaks. 
The whole effect which has been thus produced, 
is evidently to be referred, not to a power resi- 
dent in the iron or wood, but to the agency of 
the external force impressed upon them ; it was 
resistance overcome by overcoming force. 

■ 

This capacity of admitting to be bent and to 

be moved by an external force, extends to 

other bodies which have the power of restoring 

themselves to their former situation, after the 

t> external 



34 

external force is removed, through the agency 
of which they had been made flexible : bodies 
such as these are called elastic; of this description 
may be enumerated steel, whalebone, catgut, &c. 
&c. The distinction therefore which exists be- 
tween elasticity and flexibility consists in this, 
elasticity has the capacity to be ben t and the power 
to restore itself to its natural and original situa- 
tion from whence it had been forcibly distorted, 
and withheld; whilst flexibility on the contrary 
has the capacity to be bent only, without the 
power of unbending itself. Dr. Johnson, there- 
fore, with that wonderful power of discrimina- 
tion which on every occasion he is found to 
possess, very properly defines elasticity to con- 
sist of a " force in bodies by which they endea- 
vour to restore themselves to the position from 
whence they were displaced by an external 
forced By the substraction of which, such is 
the peculiarity in the arrangement of which the 
elastic substance is composed, that it has the 
power of returning back to the position it was 
in before, in which condition it remains. 

That 



33 

That the return to its original situation only 
of the elastic body by the substraction of the 
external force, is the true meaning and applica- 
tion of the word elasticity, is further proved by Sir 
Isaac Newton. In his book on optics he says, 
" when a body is compact, and bends or yields 
inward to pressure, without any sliding of its 
parts, it is hard and elastic, returning to its figure 
with a force arising from the united attraction 
of its parts." If we therefore examine the defini- 
tion of the word elasticity as given by Johnson 
and illustrated by Newton, and as it is generally 
used at this day, we must conclude that it is 
not only retained within the narrow limits to 
which the fibres are confined, but that it is never 
exerted without the intervention of external 
power impressed upon it. Elasticity conse- 
quently consists of two properties, of weak; ess 
and of power, of passion and of action, of suf- 
fering to be, and of becoming to be, of flexibility 
through the agency of external force, and se- 
condly of re-action from internal and inherent 
construction, as when Shakespear says, " when 
splitting winds, make flexible the knees of 

d 2 knotted 



36 

knotted oaks;" the splitting winds constitute 
the external cause, by which the flexible knees 
of knotted oaks were made to bend. Such how- 
ever is the internal construction of the fibres oi 
which the oak is composed, that they are able 
to return back to their original state, as soon as 
the splitting winds have ceased to rage. 

It is this dead capacity of being acted upon, 
and of being changed without the power of re- 
sisting action, of being moved without the power 
of moving itself, of being modelled without 
the power of modelling itself, which consti- 
tutes the mobility of Locke, the vis inertiae of 
Newton, the flexibility and elasticity of our mo- 
dern philosophers.* 

* " This capacity to be acted upon is proved in a manner the 
most decisive, by the commutation total and compleat which 
food undergoes, not only with respect to quantity but to quality 
also ; not only with respect to configuration in general, but to 
essential properties in particular, by the digestive and assimilating 
organs, with which animals and vegetables are endowed. Hav- 
ing detailed at considerable length the nature and relation which 
subsist between capacity and power in my system of physiolo- 
gy ; to that work, I must refer the reader, if he be desirous to 
understand the nature and power of life in converting the capa- 

if 



37 

If I proceed from flexible and elastic bodies, 
to consider the attributes of those which are 
essentially expansible, although they possess in 
common with the former, the capacity to be 
be bent into different forms, and even to be 
compressed from a larger to a smaller volume, by 
the agency of an external force, they neverthe- 
less differ from both in points the most essen- 
tial ; instead of requiring the agency of external 
pressure, in order that they may be enabled to 
unbend and expand, external pressure alone is 
the means by which this expansive power is 
bounded and confined ; instead of being like 
flexible and elastic bodies naturally passive and 
inert, they are naturally elastic and expansible ; 
elastic by pressure, expansible without it. The in- 
stant external pressure is removed, this ex- 
pansive power is immediately developed from its 
confinement and displayed by its activity, 
spreading and dilating to the utmost limits which 

city of matter from a dead to a living state, from a state of dis- 
persion to a state of combination, from a multitude of parts into 
one organized system, endowed with animation and action." 

d 3 ima- 



38 

imagination can conceive, communicating mo. 
tion to the mobility of particular bodies, and 
pressure to all, 

It is this original and essential power which 
abiding in gaseous and aeriform bodies, gives 
them the generic character of expansibility, 
strictly so called; which identifies their nature 
and designates them from those belonging to 
every other class. The distinctions between 
them are as great as they are important ; the 
jnotic-n or force which is manifested by steel 
and other bodies considered as elastic, is al- 
together produced by the unnatural direction 
given to the particles of matter of which they 
are composed; the expansibility of gaseous 
bodies proceeds from the spontaneous and na- 
tural tendency inherent in them. In the one the 
direction of the motion always corresponds to 
the particular direction of the particles of mat- 
ter of which the elastic substance is constituted. 
In the other the dilatation which takes place ex- 
tends equally in every direction. In the former 
the degree of motion produced is confined 

within 



39 

within the narrowest limits ; in the latter the 
expansibility is indefinite in its extent ; whilst 
external force is necessary to make an elastic body 
expansible; it is by the substraction of an ex- 
ternal force that expansible bodies are enabled 
to expand. Elasticity therefore is merely vi 
effecto, a power derived, not essential, an excit- 
ed not inherent power, which immediately ceases 
as soon as the compressing cause is removed. 

In matter, however, which is essentially ex- 
pansible, it is far otherwise, instead of vi 
effecto, it is causa motus ; not derived from with^ 
out, but which subsists inherently within ; not 
produced by external means, it is through 
the resistance alone, opposed by external 
means that this expansive power can be sus- 
pended or suppressed. The difference may be 
proved by simply placing a flexible, an elastic and 
an expansible body together, under the same 
relative situations ; if a small portion of air en- 
closed in a large bladder is placed under the 
receiver of an air pump with a piece of lead or 
steel, the change which the air undergoes is to- 
tally different from that of the other two. In 

d 4 



40 

proportion as the air within the receiver exter- 
nal to these bodies is abstracted by exhaustion ; 
it is found that neither the steel nor lead under- 
go any change whatever ; on the contrary the 
air within the bladder dilates and expands to 
its utmost extent. What the extent is to which 
air may be expanded, can only be proved by the 
effect which it produces. 

However difficult may be the task to bring 
such an enquiry to a successful conclusion, we 
may nevertheless form some notion of the de- 
gree, by the rapidity of its motion, and the resis- 
tance which it is capable to overcome. Mr. Boyle 
is of opinion that it was capable of expanding in 
the proportion of one to one thousand times ; that is 
to say, that one cubic foot of air, when external 
pressure is removed, is capable of dilating and 
filling the space often thousand feet: by others 
this calculation is considered far too limit- 
ed. Sir Isaac Newton, in particular, considers 
it almost indefinite ; extending perhaps to one 
millionth fX*T of its original bulk. If we re- 
flect for a moment on the energy which a 

power 



41 

power such as this must exert, we shall be at 
no loss to conceive the resistance which it is 
capable to overcome ; we shall be at no loss to 
conceive how it is that the air which is extricated 
from animal and vegetable bodies during the pro- 
cess of putrefaction and fermentation, has the 
power to separate and decompose the whole in- 
to parts, and finally to resolve those parts from 
a dead to a common state; that corks are 
ejected from bottles, and the bottles themselves 
are fissured and broken to pieces, in which ef- 
fervessing liquors are contained ; that the small 
quantity of air which is extricated from gun- 
powder during the process of detonation is en- 
abled to sap and to undermine the strongest 
fortifications ; to project out of the mouth of a can- 
non a ball to the immense distance of two or 
three miles ; to explode the strongest shell from 
a mortar; to burst it into pieces, and carry 
death and destruction to surrounding objects. 

In the various and multiplied discussions on 
this subject, which I have had with numbers 
©f scientific men, and more especially with 

many 



42 

many of my particular friends, who fill the 
teacher's chair in some of our most celebrated 
schools of science in this metropolis, I have not 
found an individual amongst the whole mass 
who had any conception of expansibility subsist- 
in gas an inherent and essential power, — of expan- 
sibility, independently of resistance. The ut- 
most extent of the knowledge they possess was 
limited to re-action alone ; to that sort of power 
which is derived in consequence of external 
pressure. It will perhaps appear still more as- 
tonishing that a distinction so strong, and so well 
defined should not only have been overlooked, 
but that scarcely any of them at this moment 
are willing to admit it 

It appears very probable to me that the pre- 
sent prejudices are the mere result of former 
errors, handed down to us through the medium 
of Professor Gravesand, and other commenta- 
tors on Sir Isaac Newton's laws of nature, as 
they have been called, who was the original legatee. 
So far, however, from considering these laws to be 
laws of nature; from all the attention which 

I have 



43 

I have been able to give them, I am bound to 
declare that they are mere assertions, contrary 
to nature ; mere abstract terms, which require a 
condition of things that in nature does not 
exist, but which nevertheless is to be p re-sup* 
posed.* 

That Sir Isaac Newton's third law of nature 
should apply, in order that re-action may be 
always equal and contrary to action ; that is, 
that the action of two bodies upon each other 
may be always equal and in contrary direc- 
tions. (Lex III . Actioni contrariam sempererit et 
aequalem esse reactionem ; sive corporum duorum 
actiones in se mutuo semper esse aequales et in 
partes contrarias dirigi.) It is absolutely neces- 
sary to suppose what is not, for the purpose of 
proving what is: it is necessary not only to sup- 
pose that space should subsist without matter, 
or matter without resistance; but that throughout 

* It is not my present intention, whatever I may be disposed 
hereafter to do, to enter into a formal examination of these laws, 
I shall merely notice them so far as I find them connected with 
my present subject, and operating against it. This reason wilt 
account for inverting the order of them, and for taking notice of 
the third law before the first and second, 

the 



44 

the system of nature either one species of matter 
alone should exist, or if different, that it should 
possess the same property, or at least the same 
power* 

If such were actually the case, the consequences 

* Sir Isaac Newton supposed, that the original construction 
of matter was solid, massy, impenetrable; that these solid primi- 
tive particles are incomparably harder than any porous bodies 
composed of them, and that they were so hard as never to break in 
pieces. Whilst the particles continue entire they may compose 
bodies of one and the same nature and texture,in all ages ; but 
should they wear away or break in pieces, the nature of all things 
depending on them would be changed. Water and earth compos- 
ed of old worn out particles, and fragments of particles, would 
not now be of the same texture with water and earth composed 
of entire particles in the beginning ; and therefore in order that 
nature may be lasting, the change of corporeal things is to be 
placed in the various separations and new associations and mo- 
tions of these permanent particles. Compound bodies being apt to 
break, not in the midst of solid particles, but when these particles 
are laid together and touch in a few parts : these particles have 
not only a vis inertia? accompanied with such laws of motion as 
naturally result from that force, but also are moved by certain 
active principles, as gravity, and that which causes the fermen- 
tation and the cohesion of bodies. The principles are not to be 
considered as occult qualities, supposed the result from the speci- 
fic form of things, but as grand laws of nature, by which the 
things themselves are formed, their truth appearing to us by 
phenomena, though the cause is not yet discovered, 

the 



45 

would inevitably be that all the matter of which 
the universe is composed, would either be all 
passivity or all activity; all inertness or all 
power; it is far otherwise — in the system of na- 
ture we behold matter of different kinds which sub- 
sits, possessing different capacities and different 
powers.* Some species that are totally active and 
energetic, others that are totally passive and inert ; 
some that move, others that are moved ; some 
that combine, others that cannot resist combina- 
tion. We behold, for example, the matter of 
light, of fire, and of air, in a state of constant 
activity, whilst on the contrary the liquid, and 
more especially the solid part of which the world 
is composed is imbecile and inert. It is by vir- 
tue of the difference which exists in the nature 
of matter, that the variety of changes, which are 

* By capacity I mean something which is passive only, and 
by power something which is active and efficient. Capacity may 
be said to bear the same relation to power, as the obedience of a ser- 
vant to the will of his master, as children to their parents, as 
loyal subjects to the laws of the government under which they 
live, and as the universe in general to the Deity omnipotent, by 
whose infinite power it is governed and controuled. 

constantly 



46 

constantly taking place throughout the system 
of the world, are evidently to be referred. In the 
investigation of action therefore in general, whe- 
ther original or derived, it is absolutely necessary 
to ascertain the nature of the means rather than 
of the end, of the cause, more than of the effect; 
when the resistance is equal or greater than the 
body acting, the resisting body continues pas- 
sive and at rest; when the power is greater than 
the resistance the body moves ; the degree of 
motion produced is the proof or test, which sub- 
sists of the power in the one of overcoming the 
resistance of the other ; so far however from ac- 
tion requiring resistance, as is generally supposed, 
it is resistance alone that diminishes and ultimate- 
ly destroys action. Hence it is that bodies move 
slower in a liquid than in a gaseous medium; fas- 
faster through a liquid than through a solid one. # 



• Professor Gravesand ridicules the idea that action is possible 
to exist without resistance, for who, says lie, can conceive the pos- 
bility of action without an obstacle; soon after however he al- 
lows resistance to be an impediment to action. From these 
palpable contradictions the following corollary is deduced, that 
the force and the resistance are equal to one another. 

Notwithstand- 



47 

Notwithstanding' this most obvious truth, it 
is neverthless contended by Sir Isaac Newton 
that motion produced in different bodies, is oc- 
casioned by a mutuality of power, subsisting 
between them. The assertion is evidently true so 
far as it relates to motion created by impulse, and 
the fact accords with the assertion, not only that 
the degree of motion but the mutation is always 
proportionate to the force impressed, and is al- 
ways made according to that right line in which 
that force is impressed. This declaration of a 
fact, is by Sir Isaac Newton converted into a 
law, and constitutes the second law of his Prin- 
cipia. " Mutationem motus proportionalem esse 
vi motrici impressae et fieri secundum lineam 
rectam qua vis ilia imprimitur." 

With respect to bodies which possess power 
essentially,or within themselves,it is far otherwise. 
It is by virtue of this inherent power, which ani- 
mated beings in general possess, that they are 
enabled to overcome resistance and produce ac- 
tion, to act without being acted upon, to move 
without being moved ; by which a horse is enabled 

to 



48 

to draw a cart without the cart drawing the horse, 
that the pen with which I write is enabled to 
describe the letters I am writing, without the 
paper having any power of resisting the impulse 
which it receives from my pen ; the degree of ac- 
tion which is produced does not so much arise 
from magnitude as from internal energy, from ex- 
tent of ponderable matter, as from activity and 
skill. It is by means such as these that the 
strong in mind, but weak in body, are often en- 
abled to overcome the strong in body but the 
weak in mind. It is in the skill which experi- 
ence is often capable of producing, that the ex- 
perienced swordsman is enabled to overcome 
the awkward rustic ; by which the little David 
was able to slay the great Goliah. 

It is this power which, in fact, constitutes 
really and truly, not only vis motus, but vis 
inertiae also; a power to move as well as a power 
to be quiet; a power to act and to resist, as well 
as a power to yield and to follow impressions 
communicated and received. 

A vis 



49 

A vis inertiae such as this is altogether sepa- 
rate and different from the vis inertiae ascribed 
by Sir Isaac Newton to matter in general, both 
dead and common; the attribute to which he 
refers is mere capacity, not power ; it is inertia 
sine vi, resistance without activity, a forceless 
force. 

So far therefore from supposing that in the 
motions which different bodies display, there 
subsists between them a mutuality of action, 
as Sir Isaac Newton asserts; that a stone 
draws a horse as much as a horse draws a cart, 
that a stone presses the finger as much as the 
finger presses the stone, Quicquid premit vel 
trahit alteram, tantundem ab eo premitur vel 
trahitur. si quis lapidem digito premit, premitur 
et hujus digitus a lapide. si equus lapidem funi 
alligatum trahit, retrahetur etiam et equus (ut 
ita dicam) aequaliter in lapidem, &c. &c. I 
contend, on the contrary r that an assertion 
such as this is erroneous in the extreme ; that it 
is thereby ascribing equal powers to unequal 
causes; confounding together inanimate with 

e animated 



50 

animated beings, as well as different kinds of 
matter, whose nature and properties are altoge- 
ther different ; death and life, passion and action ; 
things that are moved with those that have the 
power of moving ; things which derive power 
through the medium of participation by exter- 
nal force, with those which possess it essential- 
ly and in actuality ; and finally reaction itself 
with resistance. 

What analogy, I would ask, is there between 
the actions which flow from the powers (which 
I have before briefly noticed), which animated 
beings possess, and the passivity of the com- 
mon matter on which they act; between the re- 
action of a spring and the ponderable matter it 
is able to support; between the expansibi- 
lity of air and of fire, and the resisting body 
which they are able to project to a considerable 
distance. 

It is apparent to me that in propounding this 
pretended law Sir Isaac Newton never had 
in his contemplation the power which par- 
ticular bodies essentially possess to produce 

action. 



51 

action. The very term re-action, which he em- 
ploys, and the arrangement in which the asser- 
tion is conveyed, shew most clearly that it is 
to the power of reacting' only, and of return- 
ing from their forced to their natural state, that 
elastic bodies possess, to which he refers. Had 
it been otherwise he would have inverted the 
order and the arrangement in his terms ; instead 
of saying that re-action was equal to action, he 
would have said that action was equal to re-ac- 
tion ; in either case however he would have been 
incorrect. 

In order that re-action should be equal to. 
action it is absolutely necessary to pre-suppose 
not only that the medium through which bodies 
act upon one another opposes no resistance what- 
ever to them, but that space should exist without 
matter to fill it, and a vacuum be the natural con- 
dition of the greatest part of space. 

The illustrious author of this conjecture, it 
appears to me, not only made it without proof, 
but contrary to every principle in nature. If such 

e 2 an 



52 

an incongruity as a vacuum for a moment could 
be supposed, the bond of continuity by which 
different parts of the material world are held and 
connected together, would be broken and de- 
stroyed : instead of the world in particular, or 
the universe in general, being intrinsically one 
whole, it would consist of as many distinct 
worlds, or universes, as there are separated parts 
or vacua, and every vacuum would, in fact, of 
itself be one distinct world, or one distinct uni- 
verse ; it is far more reasonable to conclude, that 
it is as essential for space to have matter to fill 
it, as for matter to have space in which it can be 
contained. A condition of things such as that 
which has been hypothetically supposed, I 
maintain is falsified by every fact of which we 
are in possession; it is owing to the plenitude 
of matter which constitutes the cause why a fi- 
nite power can never produce an infinite effect, 
and why motion excited, perpetually diminishes, 
and is ultimately lost; it is the case with the 
motion of a pendulum ; if a pendulum be set in 
motion by an impelling force, the medium of air 
through which it is made to move perpetually 

opposes 



5S 

opposes motion, without giving it: if re-action 
was equal to action, the pendulum would press 
the air as much as the air presses the pendulum, 
and motion perpetual might be produced. Motion 
perpetual might be produced if we suppose that 
which is impossible, that resistance should be 
taken away, not only from the friction at the 
point of suspension, but in the medium through 
which the arch is described; if the re-acting 
power of an elastic body is 20. the resistance of 
the medium 5, thebody acted upon can only be 15. 
The action produced in consequence of re-action, 
can therefore neither be equal or greater, it must 
therefore be less; if it were otherwise, instead 
of the motion in a ball excited to move being 
forced ultimately to cease, it would move for 
ever, and an infinite variety of effects produced 
which these false assumptions pre-suppose. 

It is in the truth or error which exists in the 
assumptions, or principles from whence different 
sciences are derived, on which altogether de- 
pend the truth or error of the conclusion which 
b 3 is 



54 

is made. Instead of these laws being rules of 
action, which all matter must obey, effects 
are constantly produced throughout the sys- 
tem of nature in violation of them. I shall 
therefore proceed to examine the various phe- 
nomena which different species of matter dis- 
play, and at the same time shew how much those 
phenomena are at variance with the rules which 
those laws are intended to describe. 



CHAPTER III. 



ON SENSATION AND THE OBJECTS OF IT. 



IF I proceed to examine the relation which 
exists between the impressions which are made 
by external objects on the organs of sense, with 
which animated beings are endowed, and the 
functions which are in consequence excited, we 
shall find that although it is very true, that in 
order for sensations to be produced the agency 
of external means on the sentient principle is 
absolutely necessary; it is nevertheless most 
certain that the sensation itself does not abide in 
the external substance by which the impres- 
sion 



56 

sion is made, but in the living and animated be- 
ing alone. 

That this is the fact will appear if the effects 
are examined, which are produced by the same 
impressions on beings of different classes, as well 
as on the same individual at different times. It 
is very probable that impressions of the same 
kind and of the same strength induced on ani- 
mals of the same class, and of the same age ex- 
cite in them sensations of the same kinds ; it is 
however certain that very different sensations 
are excited by the same impression on animals 
of different species : that impressions which 
excite the sensation of pleasure in some will be 
found to give pain to others ; and the same 
objects are known continually to vary in the sen- 
sations which they produce : the hands and fin- 
gers of the same individual under different cir- 
cumstances, if plunged into water of the same 
temperature shall at one time excite the sensa- 
tion of heat at another time of cold, — the undula- 
tion of the air, which at one time will be 
scarcely audible to the ear. will at another ap- 
pear 



37 

pear like the voice of thunder, and give the 
sensation of pain, (as in phrenitis). 

In a state of health the same degree of illumi- 
nation which excites the sensation of pleasure 
in the eye, in opthalmia will occasion the colour 
resembling a flame of fire. 

A cup of cold water which generally quenches 
thirst and gratifies the palate in a state of health, 
if merely presented to a miserable being la- 
bouring under hydrophobia, will excite the most 
dreadful convulsions that can be conceived, as 
well as the most unutterable thirst ; with foaming 
at the mouth, and will accelerate death by the 
most agonizing means. 

If the sensations which beings possess were 
inherent in the external substances, instead of 
those sensations being multiplied and continued 
without end, they would be limited and confin- 
ed to the particular instant when the impression 
was conveyed; and unless it was continually 
repeated the sensation could never be recalled. 

Facts 



58 

Facts such as those which 1 have stated, and 
of which there are no end, decidedly prove that 
sensation does not abide in the external sub- 
stance, but in the living and animated being 
alone; they go to prove that the sensation of 
sweetness does not abide in sugar, flavour in a 
rose, cold in snow, or heat in fire, more than 
pleasure or pain in a whip or in a sword : these 
different bodies constitute the agents only by 
which impressions on the nerves of sense are 
made. 

Although in common conversation we are in 
the habit of connecting impression and sensation 
together, as if subsisting in one and the same 
subject, nothing however can be more incorrect, 
instead of confounding the impression with the 
sensation, the one ought to be separated from 
the other. 

The question to be determined is not whether 
the sensations inhere in these bodies, or more 
especially the affirmation that they do actually 
inhere in them, that heat is in fire, cold in snow, 

whiteness 



59 

"whiteness in silver, blackness in jet, sweetness 
in sugar, acidity in vinegar: we might with as 
much propriety seek for the living amongst the 
dead, and ascribe to death the efficient cause of 
life. r Immobility of motion^ ignorance of design, 
.'fatuity of thought, necessity of free agency. 

The proposition to be solved to me appears 
to be, not whether these sensations abide in these 
bodies, but w hat are the bodies which possess the 
poiver of conveying impressions upon the organs 
of sense in general, by means of which sensation 
is produced ? What are the bodies which im- 
pressed upon the eye shall cause the sensation 
of illumination in general, and of colour in par- 
ticular; upon the ear the sensation of sound in 
general, and of tone in particular; upon the 
tongue taste in general and flavour in particular; 
upon the skin feeling in general, the feeling of 
pleasure or pain; of heat or of cold in particular. 

A proposition such as this, with as much cer- 
tainty may be solved by a child five years of 
age as by a man who has lived to the years of 

Mathu- 



60 

Mathusalem; a child will at once affirm that strokes 
or impressions made on him by a rod give him 
pain, that a rose is fragrant, that gold is yellow, 
silver white, jet black, sugar sweet, vinegar sour, 
fire hot, snow cold. Not that these sensations 
actually inhere in these bodes, but that these 
bodies when impressed upon the different senses 
produce or excite upon them different sensations, 
to which different and appropriate names have 
been given ; of illumination and variegation, of 
flavour and of odour, of hot and of cold. 

Whilst each individual organ can only obtain 
a partial knowledge of any subject; the eye of 
colour, the touch of resistance, the nose of fla- 
vour, and the tongue of taste; the mind on the 
contrary, which subsisting not like the organs 
in parts, but as a whole total and universal, 
receives the impressions wholly and totally, and 
contemplates altogether and at once the vari- 
ous attributes of the body, a perception of which 
the organs of sense had separately obtained, 
whilst the organs of sense therefore distinguish 
the particular attributes of a body, the mind, on 

the 



61 

the contrary receives and conceives these per- 
ceptions universally; things partible it views 
impartibly, things divisible indivisibly, things 
temporal eternally.* 

Hoping that I have succeeded in showing 
that sensation does not abide in the external sub- 
stance, but in the sensitive principle alone, it 
will be easy to understand that that which is 
void of thought and of reason cannot be the cause 
of thought and of reason, that although. sensa- 
tion more than ratiocination cannot exist with- 
out an instrument or organ ; the organ is not the 
cause either of sensation or ratiocination ; al- 
though right thinking and feeling may not take 
place without a right disposition of body, 
a right disposition of body is not as a conse- 



• Whilst the different attributes which the organ of sense 
perceive constitute the true sources, from whence definition 
ought to be derived; nomenclature, on the contrary is made 
from the congregation into one point of all the attributes to- 
gether. The definition of silver or of gold is not confined to its 
colour only, but to its colour and density; its diagnosis from 
other bodies consist in its malleability and relative weight &c. 

quence 



62 

quence the efficient cause of right thinking: the 
body, it has been well observed by a celebrated 
divine, may hinder thought but cannot effect it ; 
the faculties of the soul like the sun may be ob- 
scured and eclipsed by an interposing body, but 
as soon as the obstruction is removed the light 
will shine out again in full lustre. 

It has been owing to the wretched system of 
philosophy which makes the external substance 
by which the impression is made to be very thing, 
and the sentient principle by which the impres- 
sion is received to be nothing, on which the whole 
system of materialism is founded ; that makes 
an effect instead of a cause of life; of that 
principle which is the cause of organization 
and of motion throughout the whole range of 
animated existence, from the most simple vege- 
table to the most complicated animal, as well 
as that higher and more excellent principle by 
which man is more particularly characterized, 
I mean of mind or soul. 

I shall 



63 

I shall put the authority of scripture on this 
point out of the question, because I know it is 
no authority with those who deny its immaterial 
nature; it is however certain that the philoso- 
phers of ancient times entertained very different 
ideas upon the subject from those of modern 
days. According to Mr. Locke the soul is a 
mere tabula rasa, a sheet of white paper, an emp- 
ty recipient, a mechanical blank; according to 
Plato the soul is the reservoir of ideas and of 
forms, an ever written tablet, a vital and intel- 
lectual energy ; according to Mr. Locke's system 
ideas are formed from external and sensible 
particulars by mechanical means; by Plato 
ideas are eternal and immaterial beings, the pat- 
terns and originals of all sensible forms, the 
fountain of all evidence and of truth: by the 
generality of modern philosophers the soul is 
supposed to be the effect of organs which in 
their nature are material and perishable ; that 
the soul in fact is what Brown in his absurd and 
wicked system, conceived life actually to be a 
« mere 



64 

mere effect, of which organization was the cause, 
by the Gtksr that the soul is incorporeal and im- 
material, eternal and divine. 

Whosoever compares both systems together 

will have cause to deplore the loss which philo- 
sophy has sustained in consequence of the inno- 
vation on this subject which has taken place, 
and be forced to see the attributes of mind render- 
ed subservient and dependent on the properties 
of matter. 

It is in vain for the modern sages to argue in 
favour of the immortality of the soul, from the 
eternity and indestructability of matter, it ought 
by them to be proved what the perishable na- 
ture of all generated beings, from the creation 
of the world to the present time, absolutely deny; 
they ought to shew that the organization as a 
cause, of which soul is supposed to be the ef- 
fect, instead of flowing and changing, and 
constantly verging to inevitable decay, is per- 
menant during life and everlastingly the same 

and 



65 

and that the attributes of the soul could survive 
the cause by which it was itself produced. 

Yielding however to the testimony of our 
senses, beholding as we do, not only during life, 
but more especially at the period of dissolution 
and of death, the destruction total and complete 
which the organization undergoes, the con- 
clusion is direct, that the instant the organiza- 
tion of the body is decomposed or destroyed, 
like the power of any inanimate machine, the anni- 
hilation of the soul must everlastingly take place ; 
the annihilation of the soul must then take place, 
because the power of a subject can never survive 
the arrangements out of which those powers 
were produced : the materialist, therefore, if he 
be true to his principles, can never extend his 
hopes of existence beyond the grave. Instead 
of looking forward after the death of the body 
to a resurrection of life eternal, he can only ex- 
pect an eternal annihilation; instead of exclaim- 
ing in the language of St. Paul, " Oh Death! 
where is thy sting? oh Grave! where is thy vic- 
tory?" the materialist must feel the bitterness in 

f the 



66 

the sting of death, and admit the victory of the 
grave, without the consoling hope of a resurec- 
tion out of it. 

It was to this impious class of pretenders to 
philosophy which in times of old composed the 
sect of the sadducees, the very same sect which 
under different appellations, exists in different 
parts of Europe ; they are the Illuminati of Ger- 
many; the Scavans and the philosophers of 
France ; the materialists of England. 

They constitute, in their own estimation, the 
wise men of the west, the standards of human 
opinion, in whom the perfectibility of human 
wisdom abides, to whose judgement all ought 
to appeal and bow. Instead of assimilating 
their false philosophy to the divine truths of 
revelation, they rather wish to make revelation 
bend to their false philosophy, or else altoge- 
ther discard as extravagant and absurd, the 
sublime truths which are proclaimed in the 
oracles of God. 

{shall 



67 

I shall not at present expatiate on the im- 
mediate influence which a scheme such as this, 
of arrogance and of misery, must have upon the 
mind or soul of its votaries. I ought however 
to beg pardon for the expression, — on such a 
system, soul, or mind, cannot be supposed to 
have any actual subsistence; it can only be 
compared to the index which points the time 
on the dial of a clock, which for ever stops the 
instant the spring becomes broken, or the 
weight arrested, by the force of which the in- 
dex was moved. 

It is very apparent also, that whilst the scheme 
of materialism terminates with mortality, that it 
becomes the immediate parent of which the athe- 
istical system is the legitimate offspring. By ascrib- 
ing to the operation of matter the whole pheno- 
mena of nature, it also gets rid of the necessity 
which exists to every reflecting and well regulat- 
ed mind of any principle which is intelligent and 
divine: for nothing can be divine which is not 
intelligent, and nothing can be intelligent which 
has not a meaning, nor any being have a mean- 

f 2 ing 



/ 



68 

ing which has not a motive or a final cause (as 
it has formerly been called) to direct its opera- 
tions; men such as these may appear wise 
amongst fools, but they will appear to be fools 
amongst the wise. 

It in fact discards and rejects the absolute 
necessity which has been apparent (with few 
exceptions), to all men, in all ages, of one uni- 
versal and supreme cause, primary and effici- 
ent of all secondary or instrumental causes, of 
one all creative and preserving spirit, the foun- 
tain of all wisdom, the source of all life and action, 
who made the world by his command and who 
governs it by his providence ; who is infinitely 
powerful, wise, and good, whose centre is every 
where, whose circumference is no where; by 
whose omnipresence all things are permiated, by 
whose omniscience all things are known ; not 
only the visible actions performed by the body, 
but inward thoughts and affections of the soul ; 
who is above all, through all, and in all, as 
St. Paul describes it. 



Dr. 



69 

Dr. Adam Clark, whose profound learning 
is universally acknowledged ; in his excellent 
commentary on the bible, which he is now pub- 
lishing ; in his first note says, " many attempts 
have been made to define the word God ; as to 
the word itself, it is pure Anglo Saxon, and 
amongst our ancestors signified not only the 
divine being, more commonly designated by the 
word, but also good; as in their apprehension it 
appears that god and good were correlatives ; 
and when they thought or spoke of him they 
were ever led from the word itself to consider 
him as the good being, a fountain of infinite be- 
nevolence and beneficence, towards his crea- 
tures." 

A general definition of this great first cause, as 
far as human words dare attempt one, may be thus 
given. The eternal, independent, and self-existent 
Being: the Being whose purposes and actions 
spring from himself, without foreign motive or 
influence ; he who is absolute in dominion, the 
most pure, most simple, and most spiritual of 
all essences, infinitely benevolent, beneficent, 

f 3 true 



70 

true and holy; the cause of all being, the up- 
holder of all things, infinitely happy because in- 
finitely good, and eternally self-sufficient, need- 
ing nothing that he has made. Illimitable in 
his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of ex- 
istence, and indescribable in his essence, known 
only fully to himself, because an infinite mind can 
only be comprehended by itself. In a word, a 
being, who from his infinite wisdom cannot err 
or be deceived, and who from his infinite good- 
ness can do nothing but what is eternally just, 
right and kind.* 

* If the act of parliament which obliges a printer to put his 
name at the end of every book which he prints, had enacted also 
that every author who publishes a book should be obliged to 
insert at the beginning of it the most approved definition of the 
great first cause, the Almighty God ; it would perhaps be one of 
the best correctives that can be devised against that mass of 
pollution, and of filth, of profanation and defamation which 
we constantly behold issuing from the«press ; the best book 
would not be rriade the worse for it, and the worse book wouM 
unquestionably be all the better. 



CHAP. 



CHAPTER IV. 



ON THE POWER OF LIFE AND ITS RELATION TO 
MATTER. 



THE subject has imperceptibly led me be- 
yond the limits I had prescribed; the error, if er- 
ror it can be called, would not have existed had 
men of science, instead of investigating effects 
only, pursued their enquiries to the nature of the 
causes by which they were produced. It ap- 
pears to me] that nothing but a perverted way 
of thinking could have led to the belief that 
matter, in whatever form it exists, has the power 
to convert itself into different organs, in fabric 
most delicate, in action most extensive, in form 
most diversified ; that by the congregation of these 

f 4 

organ g 



72 

organs one whole system is constituted ; that the 
result of this organization is life, and out of this 
organized life action and motion are produced, 
so that matter is the efficient cause, and life only 
the effect. 

It is evident indeed that these gentlemen move 
in an inverted order, and end where they ought 
to begin ; they begin by making power to arise 
out of weakness, symmetry and order from that 
which is naturally formless, and finally design 
and intelligence the attributes of things void of 
all consciousness and destitute of all sensation. 

Instead of making organization the effect of 
life, they make life to be the effect of organiza- 
tion; instead of making the phenomena of or- 
ganization the final, they make it the primary 
and efficient cause, in which life is supposed 
truly and virtually to consist — the source of life, 
indeed, at its termination. 

Had they however investigated the subject 
as metaphysicians and physiologists ought to 

have 



73 

have done, not as chemists and materialists, had 
they not begun the enquiry at the wrong end, 
and stopped in the middle, they would have 
seen that although action was the effect of life, 
that life subsisted prior to action, that the first 
actions of life were displayed in developing it- 
self, by acting on the matter by which it was sur- 
rounded, and that the result of this power which 
the organs possessed was manifested by the 
production of organic action ; the power there- 
fore was resident within, the means by which this 
power was evolved or called forth into energy 
came from without, the result of which was the 
production of organization and action. 

The action produced is not the cause of life, as 
has been falsely and erroneously supposed, but 
merely the effect of it; life may exist without 
organic action, but organic action cannot exist 
without life : life may be considered to consti- 
tute the principle and the cause, of which or- 
ganization is the secondary and instrumental 
cause, and organic action itself is the final 
cause. The various organized systems therefore 
which we behold, are effects only of eft t 

d 



74 

and producing causes, they constitute the ob- 
vious and manifest images of which these pri- 
mary principles and causes are the prototypes. 
It is very true that these prototypes or principles 
can only be known through the medium of their 
effects; by the phenomena of life, of vitality,- 
through sensation — of sensibility^ through consci- 
ousness — of intellect^ through the works of crea- 
tion, — that we can conceive a knowledge of the 
Creator, or as St. Paul describes it "by which 
the invisible things of God from the creation of 
the world are clearly seen, being understood by 
the things that are made ; even his eternal power 
and Godhead." 

The relation of power which those principles 
or causes bear to the subject or matter on which 
they operate, is illustrated by every phenome- 
non which is produced by animated beings in 
general: it is, for example, by the power of the 
artist over the subject of his art, that he is en- 
abled to convert and to model it according to 
his will; that the statuary has the power to 
chissel the marble, into a statue; the painter 

to 



76 

to draw figures upon the canvas ; the carpenter 
to cut the timber and shape it in the form of a 
table, &c. &c. 

It is the same relation by which the di- 
gestive, or assimilating organs which all ani- 
mated beings possess, have over the dif- 
ferent articles of food which they several- 
ly receive for their nourishment and sup- 
port Instead of preserving the identity of 
its nature, or the qualities which it originally 
possessed, instead of obeying the order of che- 
mical affinities, or becoming amenable to the 
operation of chemical laws, instead of the parts 
uniting and forming compounds, which under 
the same circumstances uniformly and invari- 
ably produce the same result: the change which 
the food is made to undergo by the digestive 
organs, is not only not the same as we behold 
produced from chemical action, but totally and 
absolutely different ; the commutation which it 
has sustained is total and complete, not only with 
respect to quantity but to quality also, not only 
with respect to external configuration in gene* 
ral, but to internal property in particular. 

It 



76 

It is this unifying power, if I may be allow^k 
the expression, which the assimilating organs 
possess over different articles of food, which are 
discordant and heterogeneous, of reducing differ- 
ent kinds of food to one and the same species, 
by which the act of digestion differs in a very 
essential manner from the act of aggregation 
simply, and more especially from chemical union 
and combination. When two masses or portions 
of matter of the same kind are added toge- 
ther, an increase of bulk only takes place ; and 
when different kinds of matter are brought in 
contact together, and an union between them is 
accomplished, the compound which has been 
formed always bears the same relation to the 
quality of the parts out of which it was pro- 
duced, whether the union has been effected be- 
tween gas and vapour, a fluid or a solid, an 
acid or an alkali, a metallic ore or any other 
body. 

With the act of digestion it is far otherwise ; 
by the energy of the digestive organs gasses are 

less 



77 

4&9S- bereaved of their expansibility, acids of their 
acidity, alkalies of their acrimony, all of the 
order of their affinities, and rendered bland and 
mild; by them solids are liquified, liquids gela- 
tenized and made solid, things simple become 
compounded, such as are inanimate are animat- 
ed, animated things are killed and revivified, the 
most sapid bodies are rendered insipid, the most 
putrid matter is deprived of its putridity, and 
made antiseptic and fresh, the most fresh and 
antiseptic is rendered susceptible of undergo- 
ing the processes of putrefaction and fermenta- 
tion. Words indeed are wanting, language itself 
is insufficient to describe the difference which 
exists between the laws by which animated beings 
are governed and those to which matter, either 
dead or common, is amenable. Whilst the phe- 
nomena which common matter displays are re- 
gular and definite, and uniformly and invariably 
the same ; we behold, on the contrary, the same 
kind of matter applied to different living sys- 
tems, as well as to the same systems at differ- 
ent times changed into a, nature totally differ- 
ent: 



78 

ent: we behold in the same field, and in the 
same soil, a multitude of different vegetables 
fed and nourished by water and by air in qua- 
lity precisely the same, and yet assuming an 
organization and form totally different. It is 
well observed by Mr. Mason Good (whose learn- 
ing and research 1 am happy to acknowledge), 
that the most burning sands of hot climates, even 
the karo fields of the Cape of Good Hope, so 
sere and adust that no water can be extracted 
from them, are the media in which the most suc- 
culent vegetables of which we have any know- 
ledge flourish and evolve; so deleterious indeed 
is a wet season to their growth, that they are 
destroyed by it ; there are also various tribes of 
vegetables that are destitute of radicles, and 
which can only be supported and nourished by 
the air and by the moisture which the atmos- 
phere contains ; a large portion of the class of 
fuci has no root whatever, and it is stated that 
the aerial epidendron, the epidendrum flos aeris, 
denominated aerial from its extraordinary pro- 
perties, and which is a native of Java in the east 
Indies, on account of the elegance of its leaves, 

the 



the beauty of its flower, and the exquisite odour 
which it diffuses, is plucked up by the inhabi- 
tants and suspended by a silken cord from the 
ceiling of their apartments, from whence it con- 
tinues from year to year to put forth new leaves 
to display new blossoms, and exhale new fra- 
grance, although fed out of the simple bodies 
I have before stated.* 

This assimilating and convertible power over 
different kinds of food in the digestive organs 
is equally proved by animals, whether herbiver- 
ous, carnivorous, or omnivorous. Meat cut out of 
the same joint, bread from the same loaf, water 
drawn from the same fountain, and portions of 
air separated from the same volume, given to a 
man or a monkey, to a dog or a cat, will lose 
every vestige of its former qualities, and be con- 
verted to the particular nature of the system to 
which it had been applied. 

This power of decomposing the most minute 

* Vide Mr. Good's Oration before the London Physical So- 
ciety. 

particles 



80 

particles of matter, which the assimilating organs 
possess, and of converting it to the nature of the 
system to which it has been applied, although 
obvious to the most simple observation of the 
most common observer, and which must be 
obvious to himself as well as to every one else, 
has been further ascertained by experiments. 
Mr. Abernethy procured a rabbit six weeks old 
and fed him with a quantity of young cabbage 
and lettuce which had grown on flannel, sprink- 
led with distill ed-water ; the animal it was found 
preserved his health as perfectly as if he had 
been placed in a warren. 

Dr. Fordyce enclosed in glasses filled with 
common water several gold and silver fish ; at 
first he changed the water every twenty four 
hours, and afterwards every three days ; on this 
food alone the fish continued to live and to 
grow for fifteen months. As Dr. Fordyce sus- 
spected that it was possible animalcules might 
have previously existed in this water, he ex- 
changed the well for distilled water, and after 
adding air to it, and in order to prevent the pos- 
sibility 



81 

sibility of insects getting access within the ves- 
sel he carefully closed it up : the fish however 
grew and performed all their natural functions 
as perfectly as if they had been swimming in a 
reservoir. 

The fact is equally proved by those animals 
who live principally upon carrion, upon rotten 
cheese, and the exuviae both of animals and of 
vegetables also; although corruption is not the 
cause of animation, animation often flourishes 
with the greatest vigour on the materials which 
corruption has produced. 

We shall find it to be generally the case if 
we were to take a cursory review of the differ- 
ent kinds of food which different classes of men 
take for their nourishment; however different 
the materials may be on which they feed, the 
blood and the flesh of which they are composed 
possesses the same properties and yields by 
chemical analysis the same product; whether of 
a Bramin who lives on vegetables alone, or of a 
tartar who is carnivorous ; and I would ap- 

g peal 



82 

peal to the testimony of any determined venison 
eater, whether he has not frequently enjoyed 
the green fat of a stinking haunch, without re- 
taining in his own person any of its offensive 
flavour. 

This converting power of the assimilating 
organ, on stinking matter, was proved by Mr. 
Hunter, and Spalanzani; they thrust pieces of 
the most putrid flesh, tied by a string, into the 
stomach of different dogs, and after leaving it 
for some time, by means of the string they witfc- 
drew the meat from the stomach, and on exa- 
mining it they found that instead of being pur 
trid and offensive as at first, that it had become 
fresh and sweet. 

That all the effects which I have above enu- 
merated are accomplished by the activity and 
power of the gastric juice, which is secreted from 
the surface of the stomach, is admitted by phy- 
siologists in general ; a great diversity of opi- 
nion however exists in respect to the mode 
of its operation ; by a few, very few indeed, it is, 

con- 



83 

concluded that it is performed by a living* power 
resident in this fluid, — by the generality of others 
that it is the consequence of a chemical not a 
living power. If it be by a chemical power, we 
ought by analogy to expect that its chemical 
properties by analysis would be detected; that 
it ought to possess some sensible properties, that 
it is either acid or alkalescent ; so far however 
from possessing sensible or chemical properties 
adequate to account for the extraordinary 
power which it possesses, it appears upon a 
close examination to be a mere mucous fluid, 
inodourous and insipid, neither acid nor alcales- 
cent, neither turning vegetable blues to a green 
or to a red colour; and by chemical analysis it 
f yields neither saline or mineral substances; it 
is therefore, I contend impossible to refer its 
action to any chemical power which it is pre- 
tended to possess, but that it is far more rea- 
sonable to conclude that its activity is altoge- 
ther derived from the energy of the living power 
which is superadded to it, whose edge is shar- 
per than that of the keenest knife, whose solvent 

g 2 pro- 



84 

property is more active than that of the most 
eroding caustic. 

Such indeed is the activity of this living juice 
that although it remains during life in harmony 
with the organ by which it has been produced, its 
own powernotwithstanding extends and continues 
after the death of the organ itself has taken place ; 
hence it is that the stomach has thefr been found 
corroded and destroyed, more especially in the py- 
loric extremity of it, and after making its way on 
surrounding parts, these have been found torn 
asunder and finally dissolved, 

This solvent power was abundantly proved by 
Reamur, by Dr. Stevens, and others ; they intro- 
duced different kinds of food in balls,some of which 
were perforated, and others which were impervi- 
ous : the food placed in the former, on which the 
gastric juice could have access Wjas very easily di- 
gested, whilst the food contained in the latter re- 
mained unaltered* 

• I cannot at this place go further into the subject, but must 
refer the reader to my system of physiology in which all the 
facts are properly detailed, 

Xv 



85 

It is by the energy of this same living power resi- 
dent in the seed of plants and in the fsecundated ova 
of animals, that the acom becomes evolved into an, 
oak,the infant foliage expanded into leaves,and the 
whole process of nutrition and of growth carried, 
on : it is this power which constitutes the architect 
and the fabricator, by which the whole machine is 
erected ; it is the base on which the whole stands, 
it forms the bond of its elementary parts, the 
cement that unites them into one whole : it is 
the cause primary and efficient, from whence 
the individuality of every living systemarises 
in which the form and the sex it assumes essen- 
tially reside ; by which the human species dif- 
fers from the brute, the brute from the veget- 
able, the vegetable itself from matter inanimate 
and common ; this power it is which I call life. 
The matter which this power has assimilated 
and organized it is which I call living matter; it 
is this principle which has been named by Aris- 
totle sdos, by Harris, form — by Stahl vis medi- 
catrix naturae — by Haller, vis vitae — by Blumen- 
bach, nisus formativus— by J. Brown, excitabi- 
lity (if the term has in it any meaning), and by Hun- 
ter, principle of life; which term appears to me 

g 3 so 



86 

so appropriate and distinct that I shall conse- 
quently continue to retain, and which may be 
defined " the poiver by whose energy different 
species of matter are assimilated to one kind, 
a living system organized and formed, and 
the various parts ofivhich it is composed are pro- 
tected and preserved from decomposition and 
decay." 

In its essence this living principle must be de- 
finite, because the body which it has organized 
and formed is limited in the extent of its growth, 
and prevented from acquiring indefinite magni- 
tude, although the materials for its perpetual 
en crease continue to be applied. 

It must possess a formative power, because 
every living system which exists, from the most 
simple and insignificant, to the most gigantic and 
complicated, is always marked by an arrange- 
ment of its parts, definite and particular. 

In its energy it must be essentially active, 
since it imparts activity to the inertness, and 

figure 



87 

figure to the formless condition of the materials 
of which it is composed ; in that energy it must 
be temporal, because every living system 
from the beginning of its creation to its termina- 
tion is transient and perishable, and in a con- 
stant and unceasing state of progression, per- 
fection and decay. 



c 4 



CHAPTER V. 



ON THE EVOLUTION AND FINAL CAUSE OF LIFE, 



THE principle of life, as a cause, may be con- 
templated in the abstract, as separate and dis- 
tinct from the action which it produces ; it bears 
the same relation to action as the painter does 
to the painting; although it is very true that the 
painting could not have existed without the 
painter, the effect without the cause, more than 
vital action without vitality; the painter never- 
theless existed before the picture which he de- 
scribed upon the canvass, as well as vitality it- 
self before vital action; that is to say, that al- 
though organic action cannot exist without life, 

life 



90 

life may exist withdut organic action ; the existence 
of vitality without organic action is proved by 
the seeds of plants, by the ova of animals, by 
the foetus in utero, as well as by torpid animals 
in a torpid state: it is proved by the multitude 
of cases which we constantly behold, in the 
foetal state, in which many of the organs which 
are absolutely necessary to carry on the func- 
tions of the adult system are altogether wanting. 
I have seen a fetus without a head, others with 
a head but without brains, some without lungs, 
others without a heart or lungs ; many have 
been found destitute of abdominal viscera, and 
with various other mal conformations of the sys- 
tem. 

Although these organs were either defective 
or wanting, the other parts of the system were 
found perfectly developed, and to have attained 
their symmetry and form. 

This assertion will more evidently appear if 
I were to examine the state of the living prin- 
ciple in the seeds of plants and ova of animals; 

there 



91 

there are not in them any traces whatever to be 
found of the future animal or vegetable, there 
is no foetus in miniature, either of the one or of the 
other ; and in animals, more especially of those 
belonging to the higher classes, gestation has 
continued for a considerable period before any 
bond of continuity between the different parts 
can possibly be detected ; neither is the evolu- 
tion equal in its progress throughout the whole; 
there are many parts whose evolution has scarce- 
ly commenced, whilst the developement of others 
has been completed. 

If foetal evolution depended on organic action 
in general, a necessity would exist for the pre- 
sence of the various substances on which the 
different organs are destined to act; the admis- 
sion of air would be necessary to call forth the 
action of the lungs; the introduction of food into 
the mouth would be necessary to call forth the 
digestive powers of the stomach. 

If the foetus were so situated its subsistence 

would in a great measure depend upon choice, 

' not 



92 

not necessity; upon choice without the power of 
choosing, upon organic action before organiza- 
tion had existed, of indigency and want whilst 
destitute of the means by which its necessities 
could be supplied, and the fetal system would re- 
semble the adult, without the power of arriving to 
that state ; it is far otherwise ; it appears to me 
that the fetal constitutes a medium condition, 
forming on the one hand a connected part of the 
maternal consitution, although separated from it 
by its own individual existence : that there sub- 
sists an individual existence in both, separate 
and distinct from each, is evident from many 
facts which we see, in which the life of the fetus 
terminates whilst that of the mother continues, 
and on the contrary in which the fetus survives 
the death of the mother. The true end which 
nature has in view during the fetal state is evi- 
dently to organize those parts which constitute 
the means by which the animal is able to pro- 
vide for its necessary wants when the adult 
state begins : hence it is that the organs which 
are designed to accomplish these ends are 
especially distinguished in the fetal state, by the 

rapidity 



93 

rapidity of their growth and the magnitude which 
they have attained when the adult state has be- 
gun. I may enumerate, as the first in order 
the head with the organs of sense and the nerves 
which are connected with them; secondly, the 
mouth, trachea, and lungs ; thirdly, the heart 
and arterial system, the oesophagus and sto- 
mach, with its auxiliary organs, namely, the 
spleen, the pancreatic, and hepatic systems ; the 
omentum, the intestinal canal, and lacteal vessels, 
&c. &c. Under the second head might be men- 
tioned the bones and many of the voluntary 
muscles attached to them, the generating organs 
and the venous and lymphatic absorbent systems, 
the teeth, the hair, the nails, &c. During the 
foetal state the brain is in a state of growth with- 
out consciousriess,"c?sense without sensation, the 
muscles without voluntary motion, the lungs 
without respiration, the stomach without digest 
tion, the intestinal canal without peristaltic 
motion, and the lacteal vessels without ab-r 
sorption. 



Although 



94 

Although these different organs are in a pas- 
sive state, no doubt can exist but that they pos- 
sess a power to act and that they only require 
proper objects adapted to the nature of each, in 
order that that power may be excited and dis- 
played in the production of action. It is this 
power of acting, of the eye to see, of the ear to 
bear, of the tongue to taste, of the stomach to 
digest, which I denominate predisposition. 

Predisposition therefore appears to be a state 
of dormant power, or a power in capacity; it 
resembles the elasticity of a spring, whilst it is 
coiled up ; like the figures engraved in a seal, be- 
fore they are participated by the wax; it is like 
the gun powder before it detonates and ex- 
plodes ; the gun powder p6ssesses the capacity 
to explode, the seal to impress the figure, and the 
spring to react. These attributes, however, which 
these different bodies severally possess, would 
never be displayed unless they were placed un- 
der circumstances fitted for the nature of each ; 
a resisting medium for the spring, a soft body 

like 



95 

like wax for the seal, and a particular state of 
the air for the gun powder : it is the same thing 
with respect to the living principle and the 
different organs which it has produced, it not 
only demands a certain state and temperature 
of the medium in which it is placed, but parti- 
cular kinds of food as well as particular condi- 
tion of it, before that dormant power can become 
power active, and the phenomena produced of 
organic action. It is in the developement of this 
power from capacity to energy, from predisposi- 
tion to action, by which means are employed 
with a view to ends, and the final cause attain- 
ed for which animated beings were intended.* 

If I were to prosecute this enquiry it would be 
necessary for me not only to detail the structure 

* Causes may be divided into three kinds, first, primary or 
efficient causes, as the great first cause and the principles of intel- 
lect and of life. Secondly, into instrumental or secondary 
causes, which consist in the various organs of the body, as the 
instruments which it employs in order to assist, as a telescope to 
the eye, a hammer to the hand, &c. &c. Thirdly, The final 
cause which consists in the accomplishment of the object for 
which the instrumental cause was employed ; the final cause 
may therefore be said to arise from the motive by which the action 
js produced, 

of 



9*5 

of those organs in different classes of beings 
both animal and vegetable, but the mode in 
which they severally subsist. 

It is with a view to make the end subservient 
to the means, of adapting the medium to the 
nature of the being which it is to contain, to pro- 
duce in fact harmony and adaptation between 
both ; that we bekold the providence of God has 
destined particular soils and particular climates 
for particular classes of beings in which those 
ends may be attained. 

When we behold the regularity with which the 
actions of vegetables are performed, as well as 
the simplicity in the construction of their frame, 
we are naturally led to conclude that those ac- 
tions, constant and definite as they seem to 
be, must flow from the operation of causes which 
exist uniformly and invariably the same, with>- 
out any opposing or controuling power, resid- 
ing within the system itself, by the energy of 
which those actions can either be suppressed 
or prevented ; there is not only a progressive 

development 



97 

developement of particular organs, from the 
first period of germination to the perfection of 
fructification ; but an appointed season for the 
evolution of the living principle itself, which the 
seed contains ; the end or final cause of which 
seems evidently to be the propagation of the 
species, as means of affording nourishment and 
support to beings of a higher class. 

The means by which the end is obtain- 
ed is not confined to one, but often extends 
to several modes, and the offspring produced is 
perfect in all its parts, whether it has been evolv- 
ed from a bulb or from a bud, from a single leaf 
or from the seed itself. 

It does not however appear, from any know- 
ledge which we possess, that vegetables have 
any organs either of sense or of consciousness, 
with which animals in general are endowed. 

When we behold the blossom of the sun flower 
following the beams of the sun from east to west 
the dionaea muscipula seizing flies by the con- 

H trac 



98 

traction of its leaves and making them prisoners ; 
the sensitive plant becoming tremulous and irrita- 
ble throughout the whole of its frame when 
impressions are made on any of its parts ; when 
various other plants have their corolla opened 
and expanded, contracted and closed at parti- 
cular periods of the day and night, as well as 
under particular states of temperature in the at- 
mosphere : I may, perhaps, be permitted to as- 
sert that these effects are not the offspring of 
the living principle alone, but on the contrary 
that they must proceed from some small degree 
of sensitive power which they may possibly 
possess (and which consequently resides in a 
nerve or something analogous to it, as the organ 
alone which is appropriated to fulfil that office) 
as much as the faculty which we behold in the 
oyster, of opening its shell at the afflux of the 
tide. 

This nervous power however, if it be one, 
does not extend throughout the whole of the veget- 
able system, it is principally confined to the efflor- 
escence, at the particular time in which it be- 
comes 



99 

cotnes unfolded, and when it is about to fulfil 
the final cause of its existence, in the production 
of fructification* 

Admitting the possibility that something like 
a nervous arrangement may exist in a few species 
of vegetables, in those which approximate the 
closest to the first order of the animal tribe; it 
does not however appear that the anatomist has 
detected its existence, or the physiologist ex- 
plored its power, in that large and interme- 
diate class of beings which connect the higher 
orders of vegetables with the lowest of the ani- 
mal kingdom. The hydra, or semi-transparent 
polypus, when examined in the best light 
through the strongest magnifying microscope 
seems to be nothing else than a granular sub- 
stance, something like boiled sago, connected to- 
gether into a distinct and organized form by 
the medium of a gelatinous substance* 

In the zoophytes and the lowest order of 

vermes, the whole of their fabric is nearly of the 

same simple construction ; the power of digest- 

h 2 ing 



100 

ing or assimilating the matter of the medium in 
which they are placed, extends over the surface 
of their system, similar to vegetables ; insomuch 
that when the whole is cut into parts each por- 
tion possesses within itself the power of gener- 
ation and nutrition. 

As we ascend in the scale of animals we are 
able to distinguish between different classes of 
each a considerable degree of difference in the 
organization of which they are composed; their 
digestive organs instead of being dispersed over 
the whole external surface of their frame, have a 
particular organ to which this office is especial- 
ly allotted ; whilst vegetables in general act up- 
on the fluid matter by which they are surround- 
ed and convert it into nourishment; animals in 
general, on the contrary, select it by means of 
the organs of sense with which they are sup- 
plied. Such indeed is the absolute magnitude 
of the organs of sense in these beings that they 
can be easily detected— the caterpillar has six 
eyes on each side, and in the snail its eyes are 
distinctly visible at the extremity of each of its 

horns, 



101 

horns, exclusive of which a number of fibrils 
arise from its mouth, which no doubt impart 
to the sense of taste an exquisite degree of sen- 
sibility. 

In the bee the eyes are not only of a very large 
size, but owing to the peculiarity in their con- 
struction, the area of their surface becomes won- 
derfully extended; in shape they are like a dia- 
mond, having at least one hundred surfaces, by 
means of which they are enabled to take within 
their sphere of vision a great number of ob* 
jects. 

The optic nerves of fish far surpass in magni- 
tude and power those of terrestrial animals ; Dr. 
Monro, who has written professedly upon the 
subject, says that the weight of the eye of a cod, 
and the depth of its axis are equal to those of an 
ox ; added to which there is a substance called 
tipitum placed at the bottom of the eye, which 
it is supposed acts like a mirror in reflecting the 
luminous rays, so as to enable the other parts of 
the organ of the eye to condense them into a 

H 3 focus 



102 

focus : by these means the concentration of the 
light to one point is so great that fish can see 
and distinguish distinctly objects at night; and 
it is probably with a view that they should be con- 
stantly on their guard, and be better able to avoid 
those animals to which they serve as prey that 
they are destitute of eye-lids. 

The optic power of serpents and of birds in 
general, and more especially of the predacious 
order, is so well known as scarcely to require 
any detail.* 



* Mr. Barber, in the year 177 S, being in company with se- 
veral gentlemen in Bengal, whilst on a shooting party killed a 
wild hog, which they left close to their tent, on the surface of 
the earth ; in less than one hour after it had been killed, at the 
time that the sky was so serene that there was not a cloud ob- 
servable, a small dark spot at an immense distance in the air, 
attracted 'their notice; this spot gradually increased in size, and 
they soon found that it was a vulture which was flying in a di- 
rect line towards the dead animal on which it immediately 
alighted for the purpose of devouring. In less than an hours 
time seventy vultures came from all directions, some horizon- 
tally but the major part descended from the upper regions, in 
which a few minutes before, no appearance of them was dis- 
cernable. 

such 



103 

Such, indeed, is the exquisite sensibility of the 
eye of birds, that they are provided with a mem- 
brane (the membrana nictitans), which they 
are enabled to spread over the external surface 
of it, so as to protect the retina from the injuries 
which it might sustain on particular occasions 
from the irritation of the solar rays ; and we all 
lenow that the owl and other birds are unable 
to bear the light of day, and that they conse- 
quently venture abroad during the night season 
only. 

The extraordinary faculty which these organs 
of sense possess, is manifested under a multitude 
of circumstances, which almost challenge our 
credibility. Carrier pklgeons have been trans- 
ported to different and remote parts of different 
countries, and upon being released from their 
confinement have returned with a letter round 
their necks to the very spot from whence they 
had been transported. The olfactory powers of 
dogs of particular species are equally certain; 
they are enabled to follow with the greatest ra- 
pidity the game which they pursue by the efflu- 

h 3 via 



104 

via on the surface ; and however extraordinary 
it may appear, I have been assured that a dog 
belonging to a regiment, which it was accom- 
panying in its march from Gloucester to Green- 
wich, and which had been stolen in the Borough, 
after making its escape, returned, two days 
after to the head quarters at Gloucester, 
where it was received by an officer who had 
been left behind. 

It is unnecessary for me to go into a more par- 
ticular detail of the power which the organs of 
sense in animals possess ; it would however 
lead to this general conclusion, that they are far 
more active and acute than they are in the human 
species. 

Without the intervention of these organs of 
sense it is impossible that animals could obtain 
any knowledge of external objects ; without the 
eye of colour, without the ear of sound, without 
the olfactory sense of flavour, without the ton- 
gue of sapid bodies, and without the sensitive 
nerves of sensation ; this sentient power seems 

in- 



105 

inherent in the nerves which the organs of 
sense contain, and are the seat in which the 
proximate cause of sensation actually abides. 
The cause of sensation as I have before explained 
does not abide in the external substance, but 
in the organ by which the impression is receiv- 
ed ; it is owing to this sensitive power that we 
behold animals display fondness and aversion, 
action and remission, appetite and inanition: it 
is by the energy of these organs, that animals 
are able to distinguish without experience in 
an intuitive manner, not only the fitness of the 
medium in which by nature they are destined to 
reside, but the substances also which are best 
fitted for the support and nourishment of their 
frame; by which the duck and the chick in ova 
after having pecked open the shell in which they 
were enclosed, take different directions ; the one 
waddles into the water the other hops into the 
barn ; that the infant as soon as it is born ex- 
presses by the motion of its tongue and lips its 
wants and its appetites, why it selects milk and 
rejects vinegar ; that we behold in the leech its 
fondness for blood and its aversion to salt. 

It 



106 

It is by the perfection of this sensitive power 
which these organ s of sense con tain,that th eir ener- 
gy is strong, and that the gratification of the appe- 
tite is the object to which all their actions tend, 
ai:d the motive by which they are impelled; by 
«ense without reason, by blind impulse, by fatal 
necessity, by brutal instinct; the final cause of 
which seems to be the gratification of the appe- 
tite as the means, and the propagation of the 
species as tlie end. 

With the human species it is far otherwise ; 
the inferiority of the organs of sense in man with 
relation to those belonging to animals in general, 
and the lower order in particular, as well as the 
faculties of strength and of motion, of sensation 
and of propagation, evidently prove that a mere 
animal existence is not his true destination. If 
the end of human existence depended on the 
extent and perfection of living power, he would, 
in that case not only be inferior to the brute, 
but the brute itself would be inferior to the ve- 
getable species : if it depended on the extent 
ana perfection in the organs of sense, the condi- 
tion 



107 

tion of the brutes would be far superior to the 
condition of man, since the organs of sense in the 
one are far more perfect than they are found to 
exist in the other. 

What man is there whose digestive organs are 
equal in power to those of animals in general. 
I have seen the stomach of a cod contain a 
large haddock, the haddock to have within its 
stomach a whiting, and the whiting a smelt. 
The shark has been known at one morsel to 
devour a man, and the large boa snake has swal- 
lowed, without any mastication, animals of consi- 
derable magnitude, not only pigs and deer, but 
a buffalo also. 

With respect to the power in the organs of sense, 
the superiority of brutes over the human species 
is equally evident. What man is there whose 
eye is equal in acuteness to predacious birds, or 
to the animals of the feline race? whose olfactory 
organs can bear any comparison with many 
species of dogs? whose muscles are equally 
strong as those of the lion or the elephant; an 

ele- 



103 

elephant by the power of its proboscis will raise 
with the greatest ease a thirty two pounder ; 
and a lion, by a stroke of his paw, will break 
the back bone of a horse, seize, and carry him 
off between his jaws, and afterwards devour him 
for food ; what individual is there whose loco 
motive powers are equal to those of the most 
sluggish greyhound? whilst our best pedestrians 
believe that they have performed feats the most 
astonishing, by walking for four or five succes- 
sive days forty or fifty miles, assisted by inter- 
vals of sleep and generous diet — different kinds 
of fish will traverse, without resting or sleeping, 
from one continent to another; and it is a well 
known fact that the same shark has followed the 
track of the same ship from theindian ocean to the 
English channel, in order to devour the offal by 
which it was allured, and which had been thrown 
overboard. 

If the comparison between vegetables and 
animals, and especially the human species, were 
made, w T ith respect to the means by which their 
wants are supplied, we should be led to admit 

the 



109 

the self sufficiency of the one and the total in- 
digency of the other ; whilst vegetables flourish 
and evolve for months, years, and even centu- 
ries, by means of fluids only, — of the simple nour- 
ishment of water and of air, which they prin- 
cipally receive through the medium of the soil, 
the latter require not fluids only, but solids also. 
In the one the conversion of the food from a 
a common to a living state is accomplished by 
the easiest possible means, in the other the 
agency of different organs is necessary before 
the process of assimilation can be accomplish- 
ed. Whilst the former flourish and propa- 
gate without the necessity of having organs of 
apprehension, on the contrary such is the imper r 
feet condition of the latter in these respects, that 
without organs of apprehension, they could not 
possibly obtain the means of support, they would 
perish for want, without fulfilling the end of 
their existence. 

f ' If we were to descend to particulars we 
should be at once convinced of the indigency 
of the higher order of animals, in the propagat- 
ing 



110 

ing power which they possess with relation to 
those of a lower class, and more especially to 
vegetables in general. An elephant seldom pro- 
duces more than one young in the course of two 
years, whilst, on the contrary, rabbits propagate 
every six weeks : this power increases in an in- 
finite degree as we descend in the scale of ani- 
mation. Hens frequently lay forty or fifty eggs 
in one season, and when we reflect that pigeons can 
hatch nine times in one year, it appears that 
they can multiply their species, in four years, 
near fourteen thousand times. 

In the amphibia this prolific power is equally 
observable; there was a turtle killed in London 
a few years ago out of which two thousand five 
hundred eggs were obtained: the quantity of 
ova that fish evolve is so immense that they are 
often known to cover, for the space of many 
leagues, the surface of the ocean. We all see 
the multitude of maggots that are generated in 
rotten cheese, and of different insects that are 
produced in different substances which are under 
going the procees of putrifaction and fermenta- 
tion 



Ill 

tion ; and a single mite has been known in the 
course of a few days to re-produce its species 
at least one thousand times. 

If we cast our eyes on the surface of the earth 
we shall be convinced of the prolific powers of 
vegetables and of the lower order of animals, 
with relation to those of an higher class. One 
single plant of elecampane shall frequently 
produce in one season three thousand seeds, 
the poppy three thousand four hundred, the 
sun-flower four thousand, the tobacco plant 
has been known to bring to maturity fcrty 
thousand three hundred and twenty seeds. — 
The astonishing power with which God has 
endued the vegetable creation, to multiply 
its different species is more especially manifest- 
ed in the elm ; it is said, by Dr. Clark, that this 
tree produces upwards of one thousand five hun- 
dred million of seeds, and each of these seeds has 
the power of producing the same number. How 
astonishing is this produce! at first one seed is de- 
posited in the earth ; from this one a tree springs, 
which in the course its vegetative life produces one 

thou- 



112 

thousand five hundred and eighty-four millions 
of seeds, — this is the first generation. The se- 
cond generation will amount to two trillions, 
five hundred and ten thousand, and fifty- 
six billions. The third generation will a- 
mount to fourteen thousand six hundred and 
fifty eight quadrillions, seven hundred and 
twenty seven thousand* and forty trillions ! And 
the fourth generation from these would amount 
to fifty one sextillions, four hundred, and eighty- 
one thousand three hundred and eighty -one 
quin tillions, one hundred and twenty* three 
thousand one hundred and thirty-six quadril- 
lions ! sums too immense for the human mind 
to conceive; aud when we allow the most con- 
fined space in which a tree can grow, it appears 
that the seeds of the third generation from one elm 
would be many myriads of times more than suffi- 
cient to stock thewhole superficies of all the planets 
in the solar system! If it was not therefore for the 
destruction which vegetables sustain, by the 
various animals to which they afford nourishment 
and to whose use they subserve, not only the 

bosom 



113 

bosom but the surface of the earth would form 
a vast animated column. 

Whatever the imagery of poets may have con* 
ceived of the loves of plants, or been asserted by 
Linnaeus of the sexual system, the truth con- 
tinues to be very questionable and uncertain. 
The various modes by which the species are mul- 
tiplied, and the destitute state of nervous energy 
in the parts which are concerned in that process 
decidedly prove that they are not only insensi- 
ble to any feeling but, altogether unconscious of 
the actions which they perform ; if any nervous ar- 
rangement has an actual existence in them it does 
not extend throughout the whole of the system 
but is confined to the efflorescence alone, at the 
particular times, when the corrolla is unfolded, 
and when the system is about to fulfil the end 
of its existence, in the production of fructifica- 
tion: how debile and limited must this nervous 
power be conceived, when we reflect on 
the immoveable spot to which vegetables are 
fixed, and the short life the efflorescence is 
suffered to enjoy ; it is no sooner arrived at its 

i adolescence, 



114 

adolescence than its acme of perfection is attain- 
ed, and the period of caducity immediately en- 
sues. The system proceeds from germination 
to fructification, from fructification to death, in a 
regular and unbroken tenor, without possessing 
so far as we can detect, any opposing or con- 
troling power, by whose energy the vital actions 
can be arrested or suppressed.* 

By the condition of animals, as well as of the 
human species itself during sleep, and more es- 
pecially as they subsist in the foetal state, some 
idea may be formed of the nature of vegetable 
existence : the foetus extracts nourishment from 
the maternal system to which it is attached as 
a cherry to the parent stock. Although it 
possesses organs of sense it is destitute of feel- 
ing; and with organs of consciousness and of 
apprehension, it neither reflects on the means 
of supporting itself or is sensible of its own ex- 
istence ; an animal in the foetal state is situated 
in a manner exactly like to an adult in a 
profound sleep, and both resemble vegetable 
life. During sleep all the organs which sub- 

* Mr. A. Knight has decidedly proved that vegetables have no 
sensation. 

serve 



115 

serve to the growth and nutrition of the- system 
perform their functions more perfectly than they 
are found to do during* a state of watchfulness* 
Respiration and digestion, absorption and circu- 
lation, secretion as well as excretion go on with-' 
out the energy of the will ; the energy of the will 
has a tendency to impede these different func- 
tions in their course: it is not the existence of 
these organs which subserve to these purposes, 
which constitute the distinguishing characteris- 
tic between vegetables and animals, as Mr. 
Hunter imagined. However varied these organs 
maybe which subserve to the growth and support 
of the system in animals, from what they are 
in vegetables, they all subserve the same use, and 
are regulated by the same laws: in all they are 
intended to build and to erect a system 
in the best possible way, fitted and adapted to 
perform certain determinate ends. It is because 
the ends are different in each that there exists 
a diversity in the means ; whilst the existence of a 
sensitive principle, of which a nervous system is 
the immediate recipient, to me appears to 
form the distinction between the one and the 
i 2 other ' 



116 

other, and not the existence of a stomach, as 
Mr. Hunter supposed, so the magnitude of the 
brain with relation to the organs of sense, forms 
the principal grounds of difference between irra- 
tional and rational animals, between brutes and 
the human species. In the larvae and zoop- 
hytes, and that large and intermediate class of 
beings which connect the vegetable with the 
animal kingdom, although there is a structure 
of a nervous appearance, which is expanded over 
the whole surface, the existence of a brain, is 
not discernible; as we advance, however, from 
these inferior orders of beings to those of a higher 
class the existence of nerves and of brain, as or- 
gans separate and distinct, may easily be traced ; 
the brain increases in magnitude from insects 
to fish, from fish to birds, from birds to qua- 
drupeds, from quadrupeds to bipeds, from 
the black to the white of the human species. 

The physiologists who first directed their at- 
tention to this subject, proceeded on wrong 
data; instead of comparing the magnitude of the 
brain with relation to the size of the nerves which 

proceed 



117 

proceed from it, they compared the relation which 
it bore to the aggregate weight of the body. It is 
not therefore surprizing that from data such as 
these the most inconclusive reasonings should 
have been made. To Professor Soemmering 
considerable merit is due, for having put the 
subject upon its true footing; he it was who first 
pointed out that the magnitude of the brain with 
relation to the nerves of sense which proceeded 
from it, was the true point from whence the 
comparison was to be made; it was from this 
mode of investigation that it was found that 
although the most irrational systems have the 
largest nerves of sense, they have the smallest 
brain, and on the contrary, that the highest 
orders of animals have the largest brain with 
organs of sense comparatively small. In the 
snail the brain is composed of a congrega- 
tion of nervous fibrils, which terminate in 
a sort of trunk of a semicircular structure. 
A shark that weighs 300lbs. it is said has a 
brain that does not weigh more than three 
ounces, and in fish in general the brain occu- 
pies a small part only of the whole cranium. 
Redder says that the weight of the brain of an 

t 3 ox 



118 

ox to that of its body is as 1 to 1154; and 
Blumenbatch asserts that the largest brain 
which he ever saw of an horse, weighed only 
one pound four ounces; in the human species 
on the contrary, Baron Haller observes, that in 
a boy six years old, whose body weighed fifty 
pounds the brain weighed two pound three ounces 
and a half, and when it is fully developed, it 
may generally be averaged in each individual at 
the rate of four pounds. 

Whoever contemplates with attention the ac- 
tual state of things will be led to conclude that 
all the phenomena which are cognizable to our 
senses, that all the productions which nature 
exhibits to our view, are effects only of pre-ex- 
isting causes. That re-action, for example is 
the effect of elasticity, expansion of expansi- 
bility, organization of life, sensation of sensibi- 
lity, and intellection of intellect; instead how- 
ever of considering that the organs which ani- 
mated beings possess were constructed as 
means with a view to ends ; by the anatomist 
and physiologist the organs which receive the 
participation of the*se powers, are consider- 
ed 



119 

ed in the same light as a builder does the 
materials of which the carcase of a house is 
made; instead of ascribing to these principles 
the effects which they produce, it is the ma- 
terials alone of which the machine is built to 
which the whole power is referred: this silly 
hypothesis is at once refuted, by the total im- 
possibility which exists of giving a rational an- 
swer to this simple question ; to the question 
which I have often had occasion to put to many 
of our physiologists, w r ho entertain different op- 
pinions ; What is the cause of organization? 
what is the cause that the multitude of seeds 
and of eggs which are deposited in the same 
soil and exposed to the same air, are able to 
act upon the different substances by which they 
are surrounded ; to convert them from a dead to 
a living state, from a state of dispersion to a state 
of combination, from a tabula rasa to organiza- 
tion and form, from chaos itself into symmetry 
and order, and from a multitude of separate 
parts into one whole system, total and complete? 
Although I have frequently heard much inge- 
nuity displayed in reasoning upon this super- 

t 4 structure, 



120 

structure, I have often witnessed much folly 
and ignorance in attempts to account for the 
foundation of it; instead of supposing that the 
different organs which different beings possess are 
the recipients only of these different powers, and 
that the matter of which they are composed 
would without them be as imbecile and inert as 
the shoe is without the foot, or as the musical 
instrument is without the art or skill of the 
musician : it is^the matter alone to which the 
whole power is referred. An hypothesis such 
as this is not more absurd than that which is 
assumed, that the organs with which living beings 
are endowed are the cause primary and efficient 
of which vitality and intellect are the effect. With 
as much reason might it be affirmed that the pen 
with which I write moves my hand, instead of my 
hand moving the pen ; that the top moves the 
whip, instead of the whip moving the top ; that 
language is the cause of which rationality is the 
effect, that the nucleus of the earth as well as 
the dirt and mud upon its surface are the causes 
of which vitality is the effect; that the whole 
material world is in fact the great first cause of 

which 



121 

which the Almighty is the secondary or instru- 
mental cause; that is to say, that the second 
cause is the cause of the first, and that the ef- 
fect produced is the cause of the cause. 

It evidently appears these gentlemen begin 
where they ought to end : instead of attributing 
inertness to matter, they make it the first cause 
of motion ; they behold it destitute of form and 
of fabricating power, and yet refer organization 
to its imbecility ; they see it matter impelled 
and yet they make it impelling matter; instead 
of considering it the last and lowest of things, 
they make it the first and the best : instead of 
separating the cause from the effect, they con- 
stantly confound both together; they mistake 
the thing produced for the power -producing, 
the fact (the thing done), for the law. Instead 
of putting confusion into order they put order into 
confusion. The consequences of this false philoso- 
phy are manifested by the puerile knowledge 
which we possess, being entirely circumscribed 
to effects only, without any knowledge of cause, 
to ends without means, to history without defi- 
nition, 



122 

nition, to definition without axiom, and finally 
to a nomenclature which never designates the 
nature of the thing which it is designed to 
proclaim. 

It is high time that absurdities such as these 
should be banished from our schools of science, 
and the rising generation rescued from the con- 
tamination which they in consequence suffer. 
So long, however, as the false hypothesis con- 
tinues to prevail, that matter is the cause of 
which life and soul are the effects, no hopes 
whatever can be entertained of any philosophical 
reformation. 1 nevertheless will maintain that 
these opinions are not the offspring of ignorance 
simply, but of two-fold ignorance, of that state 
of ignorance by which men persevere in error 
without being conscious of it, and which seers 
the mind against conviction and reproof: to me 
however it appears that if the soul contained 
parts, it must be divisible, and if it were divi- 
sible it would be destructible, and if it was de- 
structible it would be a composite, and if it 
were a composite it would have the triple di- 
mensions 



123 

mensions of length, breath, and thickness, as the 
common attributes belonging to matter in gene- 
ral. If this was the case the accumulation of 
ideas would necessarily be followed by an in- 
crease in the bulk of the organ by which those 
ideas were received : it is however very evident 
that so far from the attributes of thle mind pro- 
ducing or increasing the bulk in the body, that 
the body by the exercise of the mind is rendered 
more active and energetic; that instead of manifest- 
ing to the organs of sense any sensible qualities, it 
is altogether insensible to them : and instead of 
being nourished like the organs of nutrition, the 
food which is congenial to the nature of mind is 
such alone as flows from reason and understand- 
ing: it is therefore legitimate to conclude that 
the soul is not corporeal, but immaterial; that 
it is simple and without parts and consequently 
indestructible and immortal, for dissolution 
can only arise from the separation of one part 
of a thing from another, but which can never 
take place in a principle which is essentially 
♦simple. 



If 



124 

If the attributes of mind depend on organiza- 
tion how is it possible that any permanent idea 
of things can take place ? for those ideas could 
never survive the duration of the particles of 
matter which subsist in the organ by which 
those ideas were received: memory therefore 
could form no part of such a system* » 

Experiments however go to prove that the 
most solid, in common with the softer and more 
fluid parts of the body, are in a state of constant 
flow and change, that animals whose bones had 
been tinctured and coloured red by the madder 
with which they had been fed, had recovered 
their usual complection in the course of seven 
years after the madder had been discontinued: 
we may from this infer that as the more tender 
parts of the system are more rapidly carried 
away, that consequently the recollection of 
past events could never extend beyond that 
period. Cases have also occurred when pati- 
ents, in consequence of disease, have forgotten 
recent events, and nevertheless possessed per- 
fect recollection of those which had happened 

long 



125 

long before. A curious instance of this kind 
happened to a man who was brought to St. 
Thomas's Hospital with a concussion of his 
brain ; by proper treatment he recovered ; it was 
observed during the progress of his cure, that 
although he spoke to the attendants it was in a 
language which none of them understood; a 
Welch milk woman who came into the ward, 
having heard him speak, entered into conversa- 
tion with him ; it was then fouud that the man 
by birth was a Welchman, that he had left his 
native land in his youth, that he had forgotten 
his mother tongue, and that for the last thirty 
years he had spoken the English language alone; 
since the accident "of which he was recovered 
he only remembered the events of his younger 
days, but had entirely forgotten the English 
language and the occurrences of the latter years 
of his life. 

The opinions which are entertained respect- 
ing the materiality of the soul, have not even the 
merit of novelty in them ; they have been enter- 
tained by different men at remote periods, as 

well 



126 

well as in move modern days : by none however 
have they been proved to be false and absurd 
by arguments more legitimate than by Dr. S. 
Clarke, a century and a halfago,in the controversy 
which he maintained with Mr. Dodwel the ma- 
terialist. In the hope that the force of his rea- 
soning may produce the same conviction to 
others that it has lone to me, I shall for 
that purpose select a passage on the subject 
from his valuable work : — 

" That the soul," says he, " cannot possibly 
be material, is demonstrable from the single con- 
sideration of bare sense or consciousness itself; 
for matter being a divisible substance, consist- 
ing always of separable, nay, of actually sepa- 
rate and distinct parts, it is plain that unless it 
were essentially conscious, in which case every 
particle of matter must consist of innumerable 
separate and distinct consciousnesses, no sys- 
tem of it, in any posible composition or division 
can be one individual conscious being. For 
supposing three or four hundred particles of 
matter, at a mile or any given distance one from 

another 



127 

another, is it possible that all these separate 
parts should, in that state, be one individual 
conscious being? Suppose then all these par- 
ticles brought together into one system, so as 
to touch one another, will they thereby, or by 
any motion or composition whatever, become 
one whit less truly distinct beings than they 
were when at the greatest distance? How then 
can their being disposed in any possible system 
make them one individual conscious being? If 
you would suppose God, by his infinite power, 
superadding consciousness to the united parti- 
cles, yet still these particles, being really and 
truly as distinct beings as ever, cannot be them- 
selves the subject in which that individual 
consciousness inheres : but the consciousness 
can only be superadded by the addition of some 
thing, which in all the particles must still itself 
be but one individual being. The soul, there- 
fore, whose power of thinking is undeniably one 
individual consciousness, cannot possibly be a 
material substance. If, however, it be supposed 
that the soul is a material substance, and that 
the brain, or any other part whatever is the 

organ 



128 

organ where it resides, it must evidently follow 
that the quality of this organ must be made 
up of the individual qualities of all its parts : 
for example, the bulk of the body is made up 
of the sum of the magnitude of all its parts ; 
its motion is nothing but the sum of the mo- 
tion of all its parts ; and if thinking or consci- 
ousness can be supposed to be a quality in- 
herent in a system of matter, it must be also the 
sum and result of the thinking and cogitation 
of all its separate parts. We should therefore 
have as many distinct consciousnesses or minds 
as there are particles of matter of which the 
brain consists, an idea fanciful and false; for 
composition or division ot magnitude varied in an 
infinite manner to eternity, can produce nothing in 
the whole system but magnitude, composition and 
variation of motiom : nothing but motion, com- 
position, and variation of figure, nothing but 
figure, and so of every other quality whatever. 
If however it be supposed that not the brain altoge- 
ther, but one particle of it alone, is the seat of the 
soul, &c. that one particle being divisible into two, 

there 



129 

there must consequently exist two souls, not 
one soul in the same system, and that each must 
think and be conscious apart and not to- 
gether." 

I shall not attempt to weaken the force of 
Dr. Samuel Clark's arguments by adding to them 
any observations of my own ; to every rational 
and unprejudiced mind they will appear con- 
clusive : that no modification whatever of matter 
has of itself either the power of organizing itself 
into form, much less of feeling and of thinking; 
the analogy which exists between the vital or- 
gans of animals, and the whole vegetable king- 
dom, although it proves that the living princi- 
ple by which the system was formed is of the 
same nature in all, that it nevertheless is desti- 
tute of sensation or of consciousness. With re- 
spect to animals the case is totally different, the 
actual existence of organs not only of sensa- 
tion but of consciousness, show that they 
both feel and think; the meerest worm that 
crawls upon the surface of the earth feels a 
consciousness of pleasure and of pain, of appe- 

k tite 



130 

tite and gratification, of security and of danger; 
it not only seeks for the means of satisfying its 
wants, but is conscious of the danger to which it 
is exposed from different animals by whom it is 
devoured or destroyed; we therefore see it shrink 
beyond their reach. Mr. Locke observes " that 
animals seem to have perceptions of particular 
truths, and within very narrow limits the faculty of 
reason; but We have no reason," says he, " for sup- 
posing that their natural operations are performed 
with the view to consequences, and therefore not 
the result of a train of reasoning in the mind of 
the animal. All the voluntary motions, on the 
contrary, which animals perform, to me appear 
the result of a motive Which exists in them, and 
that the organs which they employ have objects 
for their end. The acquisition of food and of 
intercourse are the consequences of the natural 
actions which we behold every animal display, it 
is the nature of this impulse or motive, through 
the power of which those actions are produced, 
that constitutes the distinction in the appetites 
of different animated beings, to the gratification ' 
of which all their pursuits are especially directed. 

The 



131 

The extensive power in them which the organs of 
sense possess are more especially calculated to 
attain those ends which in the great scheme of 
providence they are destined to perform: the 
sense of want and of appetite which the organs 
suffer, constitutes the impulse from whence all 
their actions spring, and to the relief and grati- 
fication of which all their actions are especially 
directed. It is the power from whence the 
impulse arises which may be called instinct. 
It constitutes the principle, by the energy of 
which certain organs are employed to perform 
certain determinate actions with the view to cer- 
tain ends or consequences ; they are impelled by 
natural and blind impulse which they know 
not and cannot resist ; by fatal necessity, by- 
brutal appetites. 

Beings such as these cannot be considered 
accountable for the actions that they perform 
more than vegetables, which neither feel or re- 
flect; these actions are always limited and direct- 
ed within the narrow limits of (their particular in- 
stincts ; however varied in their direction in differ- 

k 2 ent 



132 

ent beings those instincts may be, they are invari- 
ably the same throughout the life of the same indivi- 
dual, as well as of all belonging to the same class, 
and are at once perfect,not by previous instruction, 
or even imitation, but by a sort of intuitive power 
which is possessed throughout the whole race of 
animated beings : every particular class therefore 
perform the same actions in the same way, and 
with the same degrees of perfection ; the works of 
animals are indeed like the works of nature, so 
perfect in their kind that they can bear the most 
critical examination of the mechanic and mathe- 
matician : no human art has ever been able to imi- 
tate the wonderful machinery constructed by 
the power of a bee, or the webb by the tenta- 
cula of the spider. It has been well observed 
by Dr. Reed, whose authority upon these sub- 
jects must carry with it great weight, that every 
manufactoring art amongst men, was invented by 
some man, improved by others, and brought to 
perfection by time and experience : the arts of 
men vary in every age and in every nation, and 
are known only to those men who have been 
taught them ; but the manufactories of animals 

differ 



133 

differ in toto from those of man. No animal of 
the species can claim the invention, and no one 
ever brought any one improvement, or any 
variation from the former practice ; every one 
of the species has equal skill from the beginning 
without teaching, without experience, and with- 
out habits, and every one has its art by a kind 
of inspiration ; not inspired with the principles 
or rules of art, but with the ability of working 
it to perfection without any previous knowledge 
of its principles, rules, or ends. 

If I were to enter into a particular examina- 
tion of the corporeal means which are possess- 
ed by the higher and lower order of beings, I 
should be led to acknowledge the total indigen- 
cy of the one, and the self-sufficiency of the 
other. Whilst vegetables shed their seed upon the 
soil, and fish deposit their spawn upon the wa- 
ters, and different birds lay their eggs upon the 
sand, such is the perfection of the living power 
which they possess, that the aptitude in the me- 
dium alone in which they are placed is in gene- 
ral adequate to answer every purpose of their 
k 3 evolution 



134 

evolution and growth. In the higher orders of 
beings, on the contrary, the evolution of the off- 
spring during the whole period of gestation, is 
totally indigent of parental aid. The difficulty 
and concomitant danger of parturition progres- 
sively increases from the most simple to the 
most complicated system, from brutes to the 
human species, and more especially from savage 
to civil life. The labor and anguish of the maternal 
sufferings, untill that awful and important pro- 
cess is accomplished ; the lamentations and 
cries of the infant as soon as it is born ; the total 
incapacity to assist itself or to obtain its own 
necessary wants, all prove the imperfection and 
indigency of the human frame. 

The sense of want which the organs feel, and 
the impression from external objects are nearly 
alike in the infant state of savage as of civil life, 
all seem to have the same desires and the same pur- 
suits, and at that early period human life is entirely 
of an animal nature: it is equally the case with 
savage nations in general ; amongst them the rules 
of social order are entirely inverted ; the weak fall a 

prey 



135 

prey to the strong; women, instead of being the 
companions, are the slaves of the men; rapine is 
no crime where honesty is no virtue ; killing is 
no murder where personal revenge is allowed, 
and neither adultery or fornication are con- 
sidered to constitute crimes, where promis- 
cuous and incestuous intercourse are tolerated. 
Amongst them intemperance is preferred to so- 
briety, ignorance mistaken for knowledge, the 
passions and appetites of youth preferred to the 
wisdom and virtue of age. A state such as this 
of degeneracy and of corruption may be consi- 
dered the condition of man, when he allows him- 
self to follow the pursuits alone to which he is 
impelled by the force of sensual inclination. It 
is this condition as St. Paul tells the Ro- 
mans, in his letter to them, by which they were 
degraded and debased: that they were impelled 
to act by the force of passion without reason ; that 
they had the propensities and followed the pur- 
suits of the brute without his instinct; that 
they led, in fact, a life of sense without reason ; 
he tells them that there was a law in their mem- 
bers which warred against the law of their minds, 

k 4 that 



136 

that the good, says he, that I do I would not, — 
but the evil which I would not that I did. A 
condition such as this is not the condition for 
which man was designed ; it proves what he 
7nay, not what he ought to become; it proves 
that the more he indulges his senses, the power 
of his mind becomes progressively weaken- 
ed, that instead of attaining the prerogative of 
being a free agent, he continues in the condi- 
tion of a child, or that of a man who lives like 
a brute, impelled and chained down by that 
fatal necessity of sin which he cannot avoid. 

Although there are many parts in Mr. Locke's 
book that have a tendency to favour the doctrine 
that human actions are the result of necessity, 
which the individual cannot prevent, it is not 
always the case ; for on many occasions he is 
either driven or led to acknowledge the free 
agency of man : " This I think," says Mr. Locke, 
" is at least evident, that we find in ourselves a 
power to begin or forbear, continue or end seve- 
ral actions of our minds or motions of our bodies, 

barely 



137 

barely by a thought or preference of the mind, 
ordering, or, as it were commanding, the doing, 
or not doing, such or such a particular action. 
The power which the mind has thus to order 
the consideration of any idea, or the forbearing 
to consider it, or to prefer the motion of any 
part of the body to its rest, and vice versa, in any 
particular instance, is what we call the Will."* 
Miserable indeed would be the condition of 
man if the fatal necessity to obey the force of 
passion to which the sensualist and the de- 
praved are doomed, extended to the whole race; 
if he was destitute of the power of directing and 
of regulating the ideas which in consequence 
arise, or if none subsist but what were excited by 
objects of sense. 

It has been well observed by Dr. Gregory, 
on the inconsistency of the Fatalists, that if this 
were the case there could be no variety, and 
scarcely any change in the pursuits of men ; the 

* Locke's Essay, c. iy. c. 21. 

thoughts 



138 

thoughts must flow from each other in one un- 
interrupted series, and man could not be an ac- 
countable, and scarcely a rational being. It is 
however very plain that we have a power of in- 
terrupting a train of thoughts and of dwelling 
more intensely upon particular ideas, and even 
of occasionally directing our reflections and 
contemplations into new channels; and this 
power alone is sufficient to constitute man a 
free agent. 

Although the organs of sense are the avenues 
through which impressions from external objects 
are first made, it is by the native vigor and power 
of the mind from whence ideas are made to flow; 
that whilst the spark comes from without, the 
flame resides within; although it isset in motion 
by external means, it is from the power of mind 
alone by which those ideas and motions ought 
to be directed. 

It is the particular nature of this intellec- 
tual power which constitutes the distinguishing 
characteristic between excellence and mediocri- 
ty 



139 

ty, that ought to mark out the individual from the 
species; the man from the brute, and form the 
real source of distinction in the attributes by 
which different men ought to be estimated. It 
is to the motives which spring and originate from 
the mind more than from the effects which are 
produced by the organs as the instruments to 
which we ought to attach merit or disgrace for 
the actions they perform. It is from principles 
such as these that we ought to conclude that the 
man of science is better than the artist; the wis- 
dom and temperance of age better than the ap- 
petite and passion of youth ; and civil life better 
than either savage or brutal. 

It is by the proper exercise of these powers 
of intellect directed and exerted on those ob- 
jects which seem to be congenial to its nature, 
by which man feels conscious that he consti- 
tutes the first of all generated beings ; that al- 
though excited by appetite and sense, he is ne- 
vertheless able to resist, to subdue, and even 
to act in opposition to those wants; often com- 
pelling 



140 

pelling the body to fast when it craves for food, 
to receive medicines which convey impressions 
nauseous and painful,exposes it to the inclemency 
of the seasons, and to various dangers ; to la- 
bour and to fatigue, and patiently to submit to 
death itself. 

Decus et decorum est pro patria mori. 

It was this sentiment which prevailed in 
Cato's mind, that enabled him to despise the 
danger and the disgrace to which he was ex- 
posed by the tyranny of Caesar ; he felt that the 
soul, secure within itself, could smile at the 
drawn dagger and defy its point ; that it could 
flourish in immortal youth, unhurt amidst the 
war of elements and the crush of worlds. 

Admiting the truth of these observations, and 
which must have been apparent to every reflect- 
ing mind, the conclusion presses itself upon the 
understanding with force irresistible, that the 
final cause, or the end for which man was creat- 
ed, is totally different to that of any other being 
whatever ; instead of being confined like veget- 
ables, to the production of the species, or as in 

the 



141 

the brutes to the gratification of the senses ; 
these objects constitute in man the lowest of the 
ends which he is designed to attain; those 
which are most congenial to his nature, and 
which form the true end of his existence, more 
especially consist in the perfection of Ms mind, 
in order that he may be qualified to adore the 
Almighty and become acceptable to him. 

Whilst the attributes of vegetables consist in 
the living and vegetable principles alone, those of 
brutes in the vegetative, the sensitive, and the 
irrational; man, on the contrary, in addition to 
these, possesses the intellective also ; and may 
be defined " a rational soul in an animal body, 
which it employs as its instrument" 

Say, why was Man so eminently rais'd 

Amid the vast creation? why empower'd 

Thro' life and death to dart his watchful eye, 

With thoughts beyond the limits of his frame; 

But that th' Omnipotent might send him forth 

In sight of Angels and immortal mind, 

As on an ample theatre, to join 

In contest with his equals ; who shall best 

The 



142 



TV task atchieve, the course of noble toils 
By wisdom or by mercy pre-ordain'd.* 
Might send him forth the sov'reign good to learn : 
To chase each meaner purpose from his breast, 
And thro' the mists of passion and of sense, 
And thro' the pelting storms of chance and pain, 
To hold straight on, with constant heart and eye 
Still fixt upon his everlasting palm, 
The approving smile of heaven? 

Akenside's Pleas, of Irnag. 

I • 

* No doctrine has ever, perhaps, been more completely mis- 
taken than that of predestination. By many it has been thought 
that some there were who were elected and predestined to enjoy 
every blessing in this life, and happiness in the next, notwith- 
standing the wickedness of their conduct; others again that 
were doomed to suffer every misfortune in this* state of existence 
and to endure eternal damnation hereafter, however meritorious 
their conduct might have been. If this explanation were true, 
instead of the Almighty being what he is, all bounteous, wise, 
and just, and the source of all goodness, it might rather be sup- 
posed that he is the very devil himself, and the cause of all evil. 
Great indeed is the error of those who judge in this way. It is Very 
true that hi the general scheme of Providence predestination is 
a doctrine especially foretold by revelation, that shall be the lot 
of the elect ; but the elect grossly deceive themselves, if any there 
ar6 who suppose themselves pre-elected ; the only way they can 
make their election sure is by religion and the duties it enjoins. 
It is not therefore particular men that are elected, but men of a 
particular description, which description the gospel has parti- 
cularly designated* 

CHAP. 



CHAPTER VI. 



OF THE MEANS BY WHICH INDIVIDUALS AT- 
TAIN THE END, OR FINAL CAUSE OF THEIR 
EXISTENCE. 



EDUCATION and instruction are the means 
by which the final destination of man is attain- 
ed, and by which the necessary media are found 
to connect the dawn of reason to the full perfec- 
tion of it. Education constitutes the genus of 
which instruction is the species. Education 
comprehends thegeneral habits,manners,and cus- 
toms of the inhabitants, and from whence there 
is a national character belonging to every people. 
Instruction on the contrary is limited and con- 
fined to the particular direction given to genius, 

and 



144 

and is the cause why particular classes of men 
have the same habits, and different individuals 
particular propensities and pursuits. Educa- 
tion in fact bears the same relation to instruc- 
tion that a whole does to a part, or that memory 
does to recollection. Memory repesents things 
past in general, recollection represents things 
past in particular. The necessity of early dis- 
cipline and instruction has been acknowledged 
by the wise and the good of eveiy age. Solo- 
mon declared " that if you train up a child in 
the way it should go, and when he grows old 
he shall not depart from it. By Horace, 

Qui studet optatam cursu contingere Metam. 
Multa tulit fecitque pucr. 

In every species of knowledge whatever, the 
most simple must be apprehended before the 
most compound ; it is in learning this simple 
and elementary knowledge for which early in- 
struction is especially designed, in order that we 
may be enabled to comprehend that which is uni- 
versal. To every reflecting mind it must indeed be 
obvious that all knowledge whatever which ap- 
pertains 



145 

pertained to science or to art, is reducible to gene- 
ral principles as certainly as that every effect is 
the consequence of some producing cause. — 
Many men who have not learnt the principles of 
particular sciences, can frequently assign rea- 
sons, or the cause ivhy, for the effects which they 
behold ; they seem intuitively to possess a de- 
gree of science, and to attain rules by chance, 
which instruction is especially designed to un- 
fold. Mr. Harris, therefore, very accurately ob- 
serves, that in the investigation of principles, we 
are first taught to learn that every science, as 
arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, &c. 
may be resolved into its theorem, every theorem 
into its syllogism, every syllogism into its pro- 
position, and every proposition into certain sim- 
ple or single terms. 

If we were to begin the discussion of any 
branch of science before we have attained a 
knowledge of simple terms, which are in them- 
selves irresolvable, it is evident we should begin 
in the middle ; and if we were to begin at the 
theorem itself, before having attained a precise 

l know- 



146 

knowledge of a syllogism and of a proposition, 
we should begin not merely at the middle but 
at the very end : it is therefore simple terms 
which constitute the base, the punctum saliens 
from whence all scientific knowledge ought to 
commence, and that beginning from other 
data not only leads to hypothesis but is an in- 
verted order of learning* 

It is by the previous attainment of this simple 
knowledge, that we become qualified to learn 
the connecting media, of which the most com- 
pound knowledge is composed ; by which the 
extreme parts, the beginning and the end are 
united, so as to form one whole. It -in this in- 
vestigation that the office of science consists, 
and which forms the true object of its pursuit. 

Science therefore begins from principles and 
proceeds through proper media to the conclu- 
sion; from cause to effect, from things general 
and universal to things particular and acci- 
dental. 

Things 



147 

Things universal, or principles, consist of 
simple undeniable truths respecting the identi- 
ty of which every one who has the possession 
of common seuse must give his unqualified as- 
sent, and from their majesty and authority are 
called axioms. The second thing consists in 
the proposition and the theorem, which may be 
deduced from those axioms, which are im- 
mediately founded on them ; and finally the con- 
clusion by which the things particular are de- 
duced from things universal: the former forms 
the base on which all scientific knowledge is 
founded, the other is the road which leads to it, 
through which a knowledge of the effects are ob- 
tained, as they proceed from their producing 
causes. 

This power of the mind to learn and to be 
instructed, by Mr. Harris is called natural ca- 
pacity, and is an attribute common to all men ; 
the superior facility of being taught, which some 
possess above the rest is called genius; the 
first transition or advances from natural capaci- 
ty is called proficiency, and the end or comple- 

l 2 tion 



148 

tion of proficiency is called hahit : if such habit 
be conversant about matter purely speculative 
it is called science ; if it descends from specula- 
tion to practice it is called art, and if such 
practice be conversant in regulating the passions 
it is called moral virtue. Before the habit of 
moral virtue can be attained, there are many 
appetites to be curbed, various propensities to 
be corrected and many temptations to be resis- 
ted. It was in sciences such as these that the 
ancients laboured with such ardour and success. 

Although in latter days the christian dispen- 
sation has superseded the necessity of the an- 
cient philosophy; it has nevertheless been the 
object of study and of admiration of the best 
and wisest of our divines. I shall rank amongst 
these the celebrated names of Cudworth, Moore, 
and Norris, of Bishop Newton, and of that great 
defender of the christian faith, Bishop Horsley, 
whom I once heard declare, that his philosophy 
was Plato's, but his creed St. Johns. Those 
ancient sages discovered, what divine revelation 
has siince proclaimed, they discovered the im- 

soul, 



149 

materiality and consequent immortality of the 
soul, and they even aspired to trace the great chain 
of effects which exist throughout the whole system 
of nature to their producing causes, so as to 
connect the first cause with the last matter, and 
the systems of philosophy by Pythagoras, Soc- 
rates, and Plato, will ever be acknowledged to 
consitute the most stupendous monuments of 
human wisdom that have ever been offered to 
the world. I am not competent to the task of 
giving an analysis of the means which they em- 
ployed, by which they could attain a knowledge 
of mind, independently of matter, and more 
especially of the Godhead itself. 

The resemblance that subsists between the 
Platonic doctrine and the Christian, Dr. Hors- 
iey observes, " may seem a wonderful fact, 
which may justly draw the attention of the seri- 
ous and inquisitive; and if it should be deemed 
incredible, as well it may, that reason, in her 
utmost strength, should ever ascend so high as 
to attain even to a distant glympse of truths 

l 3 which 



150 

which have ever been reckoned the most mys- 
terious discoveries of revelation; it will become 
a question of the highest importance to deter- 
mine by what means the Platonic school came 
by those notions of the Godhead, which, had 
they been of a later date than the commence- 
ment of Christianity, might have passed for a 
very mild corruption of the christian faith ; but 
being in truth much older, have all the appear- 
ance of a near, though very imperfect view of the 
doctrine which was afterwards current in the 
christian church." This learned prelate pro- 
ceeds to say, "that the enquiry becomes more 
important when it is discovered, that these no- 
tions were by no means peculiar to the Plato- 
nic school, that the Platonists pretended to be 
no more than the expositors of a more ancient 
doctrine, which is traced from Plato to Par- 
menides ; from Parmenides to his master of the 
Pythagorean sect; from the Pythagoreans to 
Orpheus, the earliest of the Grecian mystago- 
goues ; from Orpheus to the secret lore of the 
Egyptian priests, in which the foundation of the 

Orphic 



161 

Orphic theology was laid. Similar notions of 
a triple principle prevailed in the Persian and 
Chaldaen theology, and vestiges even of the wor- 
ship of a Trinity were discernible in the Ro- 
man superstition in a very late age. This wor- 
ship the Romans had received from their Tro- 
jan ancestors, for the Trojans brought it with 
them into Italy from Phrygia ; in Phrygia it 
was introduced by Dardanus, so early as in 
the ninth century after Noah's flood. Darda- 
nus carried it with him from Samothrace, where 
the personages that were the objects of it were 
worshipped under the Hebrew name of Cabirim. 
Who these Cabirims might be, has been a matter 
of unsuccessful enquiry to many learned men ; 
the utmost that is known with certainty is, that 
they were originally three, and were called by 
way of eminence, the great or mighty ones; for 
that is the import of the Hebrew name. And 
of the like signification is their Latin appellation, 
Penates; dii per quos penitusspiramus, per quos 
habemus corpus, per quos rationem animi pos- 
sidemus. Dii qui sunt intrinsecus atque in in- 
timis penetralibus coeli. Thus the joint wor- 

l 4 ship 



152 

ship of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, the triad of 
the Roman capitol, is traced to that of the 
three mighty ones in Samothrace, which was 
established in that island, at what precise time 
it is impossible to determine; but earlier, if 
Eusebius may be credited, than the days of 
Abraham. The notion therefore of a Trinity, 
more or less removed from the Christian faith, 
is found to have been a leading principle in all 
the principal schools of philosophy, and is the 
religion of almost all European nations." 



»# 



From the very nature of the ancient philosophy 
it must appear to have been inadequate to pro- 



* In the year 1784, Mr. Charles Wilkins translated at Ben- 
ares an ancient Hindoo poem, called the Bhaquat Geeta, sup- 
posed to have been five thousand years old, in which the incar- 
nation of the Deity is evidently proclaimed; and most of the 
principal tenets of the .Christian religion. This very curious 
work is now very scarce; but Mr. Morrice, in his Indian Anti- 
quities, a work of great labour and ability, has given very copi- 
ous extracts from it, with illustrations, for the benefit of those 
who have not the advantage of a christian education, or attained 
any knowledge of the Platonic philosophy; from which source 
it is probable that it is originally derived. 

Vide Tracts by the late Bishop Horsley. 

duce 



153 

tluce on mankind any general influence; whilst 
it tended to separate the individual from the 
mass, it was impossible that the mass of the 
people, through the medium of a philosophy 
which they did not understand, could obtain 
any knowledge of the Almighty. 

Before the Christian aera the world for the 
most part was governed by the law of nature and 
reason ; the ignorance of mankind in gene- 
ral, which was unequal to the task of attaining 
the knowledge of philosophy, left his moral con- 
duct without restraint, and the aberrations of 
philosophers themselves which had in a great 
measure perverted the Mosaic law, had intro- 
duced idolatry in lieu of religion. 

To destroy the idolatry of those days, to lead 
men to God, to atone for the sins of the world, 
and to save from the general condemnation 
those that would believe and repent ; it pleased 
the Almighty, when the fulness of time was 
come, to send his son Jesus Christ, into the 
world to seek and to save that which was lost; 

who 



154 

who was equal to the Father respecting his God- 
head, but unequal to the Father respecting his 
manhood. Although perfect God he neverthe- 
less was perfect man, having a reasonable soul 
in human flesh subsisting. A dispensation 
which by the Almighty was intended to be a 
rule of action to man, in order that he might 
obtain a knowledge of his Maker, must of neces- 
sity be amenable to his capacity; he therefore 
took our nature upon him ; it was this omnipo- 
tent and self-existing Being who willed to be 
incarnate in the seed of the woman, without the 
ordinary means which are necessary for the 
production of his creatures, that he came into the 
world : — he came in the flesh, not of the flesh. 
God was mChrist reconciling the world to himself; 
manifesting his divinity by his miracles and 
prophesies,* his precepts, and his example; 

* The previous certainty of things to come is oneof those truths 
which are not easily apprehended. The difficulty seems to arise/' 
says the Bishop of St. Asaph, " from a habit that we have of mea- 
suring all intellectual powers by the standard of human intellect. 
There is nothing in thenatureof certainty, abstractly considered, to 
connect it with past time or with the present, more than with the 
future ;but human knowledge extends in so small a degree to future 
things, that scarce any thing becomes certain to us till it is come 

teaching 



155 

teaching the way of salvation by means which 
were amenable to the capacity of all. Regenera- 
tion through grace, repentance through faith, re- 



to pass, and therefore we are apt to imagine that things acquire 
their certainty from their accomplishment. But this is gross 
fallacy. The proof of an event to us always depends either up- 
on the testimony of others or the evidence of our own senses ; 
but the certainty of events in themselves arises from their natural 
connexion with their proper causes. Hence to that great Being 
who knows things not by testimony, not by sense, but by their 
causes ; as being himself the first cause, the source of power and 
activity to all other causes; to Him everything that shall ever 
be, is at all times infinitely more certain than any thing either 
past or present can be to any existing being, and some of those ne- 
cessary truths which are evidenced to every man, not by his 
bodily senses, but by that internal perception which seems to be 
the first act of created intellect. 

This certainty, however, is to be carefully distinguished from a 
true necessity inherent in the nature of the thing. A thing 
is necessary when the idea of existence is included in the idea of 
the thing as an inseparable part of it. Thus, God is necessary; 
the mind cannot think of him at all without thinking of him as 
existent. The very notion and name of an event excludes this 
necessity, which belongs only to things uncaused. The events 
of the created universe are certain, because sufficient causes do, 
not because they must, act to their production. God knows 
this certainty, because he knows the action of all these causes, 
inasmuch as he himself begins it, and perfectly comprehends 
those mutual connexions between the things he hath created, 
which renders this a cause and that its effect. 

demption 



156 

demption by the atonement which he made of 
himself, in order that through its efficacy all 
that believed might inherit life eternal. 

To the philosophers of those days, and more 
especially to the Greeks, he pointed out the in- 
sufficiency of human reason for the attainment 
of divine knowledge: he told them to banish 
from their minds the prejudices of their educa- 
tion ; and to receive his doctrine like little chil- 
dren in simplicity and in truth. The promulgation 
of a doctrine such as that, and which was to spread 
throughout the whole world, appeared so repug- 
nant to the notion of the philosophy of those to 
whom it was addressed that it could not be credit- 
ed. To the Jews, who expected a Messiah in all 
earthly grandeur, and not a victim to be sacri- 
ficed, it was " a stumbling block ;" to the Greeks 
-who sought for eternity through the energy of 
reason, it was to them foolishness ; neither the 
Jews or the Greeks comprehended how mi- 
nisters (as the instruments who w r ere to be em- 
ployed to preach this new religion) taken 
from the lowest ranks of society could be qua- 
lified 



157 

lifted for such an office, fishermen, tent makers, 
and our Saviour himself was afterwards 
by them called the carpenter's son. It never 
entered into their imagination that the weakness 
of the means were employed in order to shew that 
the divinity of the dispensation could not come 
from them but from God ; and they never could 
conceive that God would chuse " the foolish 
things of this world to confound the wise, and the 
weak things of this world to confound the things 
that are mighty." 

Whatever affinity may be supposed to exist 
between the Platonic philosophy and the Chris- 
tian dispensation, the one differs from the other 
in points the most essential ; whilst the former 
requires for its apprehension an intellect the 
most gigantic, study and application the most 
intense, learning and knowledge the most pro- 
found ; the latter, on the contrary, by means of 
that grace which the Almighty has vouchsafed 
to bestow on those who in sincerity and in truth 
seek for it, produces on the mind an immediate 
capacity of receiving the truths of the gospel. 

The 



158 

The former therefore can only form the wisdom 
of the few, the latter of the multitude, and con- 
stitutes the hope and the consolation of the low 
as of the high, of the ignorant as of the learned ; 
if it were otherwise, mankind in general might 
have cause to arraign the bounty of the Almigh- 
ty, and complain of the unequal distribution of 
his favours ; a dispensation which by him was 
intended to be a rule of action to man, in order 
that he might obtain a knowledge of his Maker, 
it became a matter of justice that it should be 
amenable to the capacities of mankind in gene- 
ral. Grace therefore does to all, what philoso- 
phy alone is unable to effect upon the individual ; 
not by philosophy or vain conceit, but by puri- 
fying the soul and qualifying it to receive the 
influence of the holy spirit. These attributes 
can no more be apprehended, by matter in gene- 
ral, which is destitute of life, than by \egeU 
ables, or by brutes in particular ; by veget- 
ables which possess vitality without sensi- 
bility, or by brutes who have sensibility with- 
out intellect. The brute himself, no more than 
man t who leads the life of a brute, whose whole 

thoughts 



159 

thoughts and actions are directed to the gratifi- 
cation of his senses, and whose senses are never 
gratified untill they are surfeited, can never in 
that degraded state obtain any perception of 
spiritual things, more than those amongst us who 
believe that there subsists within them no other 
power than what arises from the mere matter of 
which they are composed ; the one can no more 
have communion with the other, than the most 
ignorant and uneducated amongst the sons 
of men is able to understand the highest branches 
of human knowledge ; to obtain, for example, 
a perfect knowledge of sublime geometry, al- 
though totally ignorant of lines and figures; 
of all languages, without possessing any appre- 
hension of sound ; and of all sciences without 
any perception whatever of the truths or prin- 
ciples on which they are founded. 

Between the lowest degrees of instinct and of 
sense, the offspring of animal existence and the 
mind of man, there can be no understanding, 
because there is no analogy between them ; the 
most irrational animal is no more able to appre- 
hend 



160 

hend the knowledge of the most rational man ; 
than the most rational man imitate the instinct of 
the most irrational brute; the cause lays in the 
ignorance of the one and the wisdom of the 
other. No correspondence whatever can sub- 
sist between beings whose natures are separat- 
ed by a chasm so widely different. It is 
with a view of adapting our meaning to the 
level of the understanding of the brute by which 
that information is to be received, that in our 
intercourse with animals, we converse with 
them in a silly unmeaning manner, because to 
them a wise and intelligent conversation would 
be unintelligible and foolish. Children therefore 
or men who act like children, have animals more 
immediately under controul, than the philoso- 
gopher who is replete with wisdom and know- 
ledge. 

If the ordinary powers of the human mind 
are so superior, as they unquestionably are, to 
those of the most rational animals, by what an 
immeasurable distance must the universal intel- 
lect of Almighty God be separated from the 

mind 



161 

mind of man — the creator from the creature, 
the infinite being from the being which is finite; 
the most perfect intellection which proceeds 
from the energy of the purest intellect is as the dust 
of the earth, when it is compared to the divine 
mind of the Almighty. The clod of earth on 
which we stand, and the uttermost part of the 
heavens is not a span long, in the relation which 
man bears to God. If God therefore had not 
manifested some portion of his attributes, by 
means which are on a level to the capacity of 
the human race, man must for ever have been 
ignorant of his maker. He therefore " who at 
sundry times, and in divers manners, hath 
spoken unto the fathers by the prophets, hath 
in these latter days spoken unto us by his Son/' 
made of the same materials as ourselves, born 
of a woman, obnoxious to human wants, and 
liable to the same dangers. 

As it must ever be considered, that in a christian 

country the people should have a proper notion 

M of 



162 

of Christianity, I shall abstract an analysis from 
a sermon on the incarnation, preached in this 
parish on Christmas day, twenty seven years 
ago^ by Dr. Horsley, the rector, and which puts 
this subject in the clearest light:— 

" It is not as the birth day of a prophet, that this day is 
sanctified, but as the anniversary of that great event, which had 
been announced by the whole succession of prophets from the 
beginning of the world, and on which the predictions concerning 
the manner of the Messiah's advent found their literal and com- 
plete accomplishment: in which the miraculous conception 
makes so principal a part ; it makes the foundation of the whole 
distinction between the character of Christ in the condition of 
a man, and that of any other prophet. Had the conception of 
Jesus been in the natural way, had he been the fruit of Mary's 
marriage with her husband, his intercourse with the Deity might 
have been of no other kind than the nature of any other man 
might have equally admitted; an intercourse which the 
prophets enjoyed when their minds were enlightened by the ex- 
traordinary influence of the holy spirit: the influence might 
have been greater in degree, but it must have been the same in 
kind. The holy scriptures speak in a very different language ; 
they tell us, that the same God who spoke in times past by the 
prophets, hath in these latter 'days spoken unto us by his Son; 
evidently establishing a distinction of Christianity from preced- 
ing 



163 

ing revelations, upon a distinction between the two characters 
of a Prophet of God, and of God's Son ; between Moses himself, 
with whom Jehovah conversed face to face, and Jesus himself; 
the former bears to the latter the relation of a servant to a son ; 
but least this superiority should be mistaken for a superiority of 
office on the side of the Son, we are told that the Son is *\ higher 
than the angels, being the effulgence of God's glory, the ex- 
press image of his person ; the God, whose throne is for ever and 
ever, the sceptre of whose kingdom is a sceptre of righteousness." 
Had Christ been a mere prophet, to have believed in Christ had 
been the same thing as to believe in John the Baptist; the mes- 
sages indeed announced on the part of God by Christ, and by 
John the Baptist, might have been different, and the importance 
of the different messages unequal, but the principle of belief in 
either must have been the same. The intercourse which Christ 
as a man held with God, was different in kind from that which 
the greatest of the prophets ever had enjoyed; and this could 
only have been produced by the eternal word, who was in the 
beginning with God, and was God ; having so joined himself to the 
holy thing which was formed in Mary's womb,* that the two 

* Although revelation is the authority to which we should ap- 
peal for divine knowledge, we are nevertheless not interdicted 
the privilege of endeavouring to search for it -through aid of 
human means, provided those means lead to a conformity with, 
not to an opposition of holy writ; so far however from Revela- 
tion being in contradiction to philosophy, true philosophy con- 

M 2 



164 

natures, from the commencement of the Virgin's conception, 
made one person. Between God and any living being, having 
a distinct personality of his own, separate from the Godhead, 
no other communion could obtain, than what should consist in the 
action of the Divine Spirit upon the faculties of the separate 



sists in confirming the truth of revelation. The revelation which 
declared that ** in the beginning was the word, and the word was 
With God, and the word was God, the same was in the beginning 
with God, and that the word was made flesh and dwelt among 
us, &c. &c." so far from being inconceivable to human appre- 
hension, appears to me as easy to comprehend as any part of 
the creation. It has been the especial object which I have had 
in view, so far as I have gone, to prove that all the phenomena 
which take place in the universe, are effects only of producing 
causes; that these effects are ends, of which there of necessity 
must have been a beginning; that the power which was from 
the beginning is the cause to which the ultimate effect is to be 
referred, (e. g.) Action is the effect, of which organization is the 
cause; organization is the effect of which the principle of life is 
the cause; thinking is an effect of which the thinking principle 
is the cause; all the children of any one family are ends of 
which their parents are the beginning; these parents are the 
offspring of former parents, the succession therefore may be 
traced of animals and of vegetables to first parents; to first pa- 
rents which did not produce themselves, but which were pro- 
duced by some other being : I say some other being, because 
there is not any thing, save the one First and Universal Cause, 
which can be the cause of itself. Admitting therefore that 
Adam and Eve were the first parents of the human species, it 
must follow, that as no created thing can be the cause of itself, 
a time must have been, when the first vegetables were creat- 
ed without seed, the first animals without intercourse: the of- 



165 

person, as was enjoined by the prophets ; but Jesus according to 
the primitive doctrine, was so united to the ever living word, 
that the very existence of the man consisted in this union. 

We find in scripture the characteristic properties of both na- 
tures, the bumau and the divine, ascribed to the same person. 



ganization and action of these bodies are nothing more than the 
manifestation of the principles or causes by which they were 
produced; these principles must therefore have existed in the 
divine mind prior to their evolution, in the same manner as the 
living principles both of vegetables and of animals, before or- 
ganization and action ; these principles became manifested by th* 
power which they possess of acting on the matter which has 
the aptitude to be acted upon by them; the vegetable seed by 
vegetable life; animal ova by animal life; the brain by intell- 
ectual life. How much less difficult, is it not, to conceive, that the 
Divine Being, he who was the immediate progeny of the Father, 
-(and who formed with him one being, as the matter of light and 
the sun form one whole), might be received into the seed of the 
woman, as had been foretold by the ancient prophets; without 
the aid of those ordinary means which are found necessary in 
some of the lowest classes of animals. It willed the Son of 
God to chuse the human species to constitute the instrument of 
his power, because it was to the human species to which he 
manifested himself, and for the salvation of which he came down 
from heaven. Had his dispensation been intended for brutes or 
for vegetables, it is very probable that he would have come into 
the world in the body of a brute or of a vegetable; but being 
intended for the human race, in order that it might be adapted 
to the nature of the beings by which it was to be received; he 
came in a human form independently of human means, of 
the *eed of the woman without masculine cooperation. May 

31 3 



166 

We read of Jesus, that he suffered from hunger and from fatigue; 
that he wept for grief, and was distressed with fear ; that he was 
obnoxious to all the errors of humanity, except the propensity to 
sin. John x. vii. And that we may in some manner understand 
how infirmity and perfection should thus exist in the same per-? 
son, we are told by St. John, that the " word was made flesh." 
A man conceived in the ordinary way would have derived the 
principles of his existence from the mere physical powers of 
generation; but the union with the divine nature could not have 
been the principle of an existence physically derived from 
— ^ > — — 1 

/fe»yve not be permitted to suppose that the whole visible world 
^ exhibits nothing more than so many passing pictures, of 
which the principles are the prototypes or exemplers, and that 
it is through the participation of them which matter has acquir- 
ed, that it may be said to have obtained a semblance of im? 
mortality. 

May we not be allowed to credit those speculative men which 
in times of old have told us, that it is in these comprehensive 
and permanent principles (or forms, as they have been called), 
that the Deity views at once without looking abroad, all possible 
productions, both present, past, and future ; that this great and 
Stupendous view is but a view of himself; where all things lie 
envelloped in their principles or exemplers, as being essential to 
the fulness of his universal intellect] n: if such be the case the 
axiom which is so applicable to the materialist, Nil est in intellectu 
quod non prius fuit in sensu, that there subsists nothing in intellect 
which did not before subsist in sense, must be reversed, but we 
ought rather to say, Nil est in sensu quod non prius fuit in intel- 
lectu, that nothing exists in sense which did not pre-exist in, 
intellect. 



Adam, and that intimate union of God and man in the Re- 
deemer's person had been a physical impossibility. 

" By the Redeemer's offering of himself as an expiatory sacri* 
fee, it was necessary that the manner of his conception should 
be such, that he should in no degree partake of the natural pol- 
lution of the fallen race, whose guilt he came to atone, nor be 
included in the general condemnation of Adam's progeny. u In 
Adam all die,* and for many lives thus forfeited a single life, 
itself a forfeit, had been no ransom, not only the progeny but the 
progenitor, every one sprung from the loins of Adam, is a debtor 
to divine justice, and incapable of becoming a mediator for his 
brethren. " In many things," we offend all; " if we say we 
have no sin we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 
And if any man sin we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus 
Christ the righteous, and he is a propitiation for our sins." The 
condemnation and the iniquity of Adam's progeny were univer- 
sal. To reverse the universal sentence, and to purge the uni- 
versal corruption, a redeemer was to be found pure, of every stain 
of inbred and contracted guilt. And since every person pro- 
duced in the natural way could not but be of the contaminated 
race; the purity requisite to the efficacy of the Redeemer's atone- 
ment, made it necessary that the manner of his conception should 
be supernatural : the miraculous conception once admitted, 
naturally brings after it the great doctrines of the atonement and 
tne incarnation. The miraculous conception of our Lord im- 
plies some higher purpose of his coming than the mere business 
of a teacher. Such business might have been performed by a 

m 4 mere 



168 

mere man, enlightened with the prophetic spirit. Had teach- 
ing therefore been the sole purpose of our Saviour's coming, a 
mere man might have done the whole business, and the super- 
natural conception had been an unnecessary miracle. He there- 
fore who came in this miraculous way, came upon some higher 
business, to which a mere man wa9 unequal. He came to be 
made a sin offering for us, " that we might be made the righte- 
ousness of God in him." 

So close therefore is the connection of this 
extraordinary fact with the cardinal doctrines of 
the gospel, that it may be justly deemed a ne- 
cessary branch of the scheme of redemption. 

Although it is greatly to be deplored, that a 
large proportion of the world continues depriv- 
ed of the benefit of the christian dispensation, 
there are few people congregated together into 
one society, who are destitute of religion — of 
a belief, that there exists some being superior 
to themselves, and who consequently becomes 
the object of their adoration and worship : the 
very act of humiliation which they offer consti- 
tutes them religious beings ; whether the object of 
their adoration be symbolized by the sun, or by 

the 



169 



the moon, by a stock or a stone. It is by the par- 
ticular doctrines which particular religions en- 
force, that men are directed to particular 
modes of worship, and from whence the moral 
conduct of the individual takes his bend. 

It is the especial object of the christian dis- 
pensation to teach man to have a knowledge of 
himself, in order that he may know what he real- 
ly is : that although he possesses within himself 
a soul, immortal and divine, that this divine na- 
ture is nevertheless full of corrupt affections from 
the depravity of the animal constitution, by 
which it is denied ; that he is less disposed to ac- 
quire the perfection of the one, than to indulge 
the impulse of the other; that he is by nature 
born in sin, and the child of wrath ; that instead 
of resisting the allurements of passion and of 
vice, he is prone to yield to their influence; in- 
stead of resisting like the oak of the forest to 
the hurricane force by which he is assailed, he 
bends to temptation like the willow to the air; 
and that he is incapable of becoming accept- 
able to the Almighty by his own works. 

Notwithstanding 



170 

Notwithstanding the fallen condition of man, 
he is not left altogether destitute of attaining the 
end for which he is designed : if he employs the 
means, they are always within his reach ; in order 
however that regeneration from sin should be 
obtained, it is absolutely necessary that he 
should give up the ".old man," " be born again" 
" live in newness of life" and in the simplicity 
of a child follow the means of salvation which 
are proclaimed in the gospel. 

By constant watchfulness and humility, by 
abstraction from passion and from sense, by self- 
examination and repentance, by imploring be- 
fore the throne of grace, aid of the Holy Spirit, 
man attains that peace of mind which surpasseth 
all understanding; that assimilation of soul with 
the divine nature, which enables him to com- 
mune with his God, and have his redemption from 
sin secured through the efficacy of his Saviour's 
atonement. 

It is the efficacy of his faith in this atonement 
which enables him to triumph over indigence and 

oppression 



/ 



171 

oppression, and rise in full vigour when appetite is 
no more; to smooth the brow of care and dispel the 
gloom of despondency, sweeten the bitterness of 
grief, and lull agony to rest. Religion ought there- 
fore to constitute the base of every national 
establishment, and be the rock which the 
whole nation as one man ought to grasp. It 
ought to form the main spring of his actions, 
the beginning, the middle, and the end of his 
pursuits; and it is humbly hoped that although 
the glad tidings of salvation have been confined 
to particular people, the efficiency of the at- 
tonement will extend to all nations and kindreds 
of the world. 

It is greatly to be deplored that in a christian 
country like this, the same errors frequently 
are found to exist in the principles and ends of 
the christian religion, as exist in different 
branches of philosophy ; that instead of making 
religion the basis of morality, morality is made 
the sum total of all religion. This appears to 
Jiave been the error of Mr. Pope, who although 

a good 



172 

a good poet was a bad divine; he contended that 
morality was the base and sum of all religion. 

" For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight, 
" He can't be wrong whose life is in the right." 

So far from this position being true it is totally 
false, and ought to be reversed; the poetry 
must be made bad to have the divinity made 
good : — 

u For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight, 
" He can't be right whose faith is in the wrong."* 

The truth of this position will evidently appear, 
if religion and morality are properly denned. 
Religion in the practical part is a studious con- 
formity of our actions, our wills, and our appe- 
tites, to the revealed will of God, in pure regard 
to the divine authority, and to the relation in 
which we stand to God, as discovered to us by 
revelation. On the contrary, morality is a con^ 
formation of our actions to the relation in which 
we stand to each other in civil society. So that 
although religion includes within its operation 
* See the Biahop of St. David's Charge to his Diocese. 

every 



173 

every branch of morality, morality falls very 
short of attaining the duties of religion ; it nei- 
ther reaches the secrets meditation of the mind, 
nor the silent desires of the heart ; it neither 
imposes restraint upon the sensuality of the 
imagination, nor the private prurience of the ap- 
petite. Morality does not say, Thou shalt not 
covet, thou shalt love thine enemies, thou shalt 
bless them that curse thee, do good to them that 
persecute; neither does it enjoin the forgiveness 
of injuries, or the giving of alms to the poor. 
The highest principle in morals is a just regard 
only to the rights of each other in civil society. 
The first principle in religion, on the contrary 
is the love of God ; that is to say, in regard to the 
relation which we bear to him, as is made known 
to us by revelation. A religious man, strictly 
so called, does good by design and evil by chance; 
although his benevolence may be bestowed on 
unworthy objects, the goodness of his motive 
absolves him from any error they may cause. 
On the contrary, the mere moral man, having 
no higher motives than mere personal gratifica- 
tion, the moral works he perforins are conse- 
quently 



174 

quently irreligious, not contrary to religion, but 
without it : he therefore does good by chance, 
and if he commits evil, the selfishness of his mo- 
tive precludes all charitable excuse, because he 
does it by design. It is therefore through faith 
in revelation, and which, in its beginning, is 

unquestionably a distinct gift of God, that we 

\ 
become religiously moral, have the fear of God 

constantly before our eyes, and conform our 
actions to the precepts of revelation. Faith 
constitutes the means, morality is the end. To 
suppose practice separable from faith, is to say 
that the end is attainable without the means; 
or finally, to affirm that faith can exist without 
practice, is to suppose that a producing cause can 
exist without producing an effect. It is by the ef- 
ficacy of this faith that the distinction between 
the philosopher and the idiot is abolished, and 
by which " all that believe are saved," corrup- 
tion is buried in incorruption, mortality in immor- 
tality, and the soul finds eternal rest after the 
earthly tabernacle in which it is contained is 
dissolved.* 

CHAP. 



CHAPTER VII. 



ON THE PHYSIOLOGY OF LIFE, 



AFTER having briefly but imperfectly de- 
tailed the ends for which it appears the different 
classes of animated beings were created, the 
subject would naturally lead me to describe the 
means through the agency of which those ends 
are accomplished. It is greatly to be deplored, 
that in the very onset of the enquiry physiolo- 
gists are at variance ; although all must admit 
the necessity of life, of that poiver by whose 
energy different species of matter are assimilated 

to 



176 

to one kind, a living system organized and form- 
ed y and the various parts of which it is composed 
protected and preserved from decomposition and 
decay, none agree in opinion with respect to 
its nature; the generality of physiologists either 
profess their total ignorance of the subject, 
or else ascribe it to matter which is either 
dead or common. To the late Mr. John Hun- 
ter the greatest merit is due for the advances 
which he made to tear away the veil of igno- 
rance and of error, in which even in his time 
physiology was involved ; his discerning mind 
perceived the distinction which exists between 
chemical and vital action, as well as between 
vitality and organization ; he considered that 
the organization was an effect of which life was 
the cause — that life was superadded to matter 
as magnetism is to iron. The dawn of light, 
however, which began to illuminate physiology, 
whilst Mr. Hunter was alive to give autho- 
rity to his opinions, became immediately obscur- 
ed after his death ; instead of succeeding to estab- 
lish the paramount predominant power of life, as 
the cause from which all the phenomena of 

living 



177 

living action proceed, they are at this time for 
the most part referred to the agency of chemical 
and mechanical means, and the science of phy- 
sicfis erroneously employed to explain that of 
physiology. 

By many it is supposed that the principle of 
life resides in oxygen gas, and which has con- 
sequently been called vital air. Oxygen 'gas 
is formed by and obtained from the oxydes 
of metals, and of semi-metals, more especial- 
ly of minium and manganeeze, and is con- 
stantly excreted as deleterious and foreign from 
the vegetable kingdom in general. It is this 
particular air, this oxygenous matter, which ve- 
getables in the day time are perpetually dis- 
charging from the whole external surface of their 
foliage as urinous and dead, and which these 
pure defecated philosophers conceive consti- 
tutes the principle of life in which all power 
essentially resides, the immediate and proxi- 
mate cause of irritability in man ! !! 

n By 



178 

By another class the legitimate offspring of 
an unnatural parent, life is supposed to be a forced 
state, not an original principle; not an effect 
simply, but the effect of an effect. It is stated 
that certain substances called stimuli, — as bran- 
dy, water, food, &c. &c. act upon a certain some- 
thing, which according to the gypsey jargon of 
this school has been called excitability: that 
these exciting powers by acting on this excita- 
bility, produce an effect which is called excite- 
ment, and that excitement constitutes life, and is 
the proximate cause of it,— the source of life in- 
deed, at its termination, — it makes life to begin 
out of the body, and to end in it, instead of be- 
ginning in it and ending out of it. In this hy- 
pothesis life is in fact forced into existence by 
the united action of the stimuli and the excitabili- 
ty together, a tertiumquid is formed, in the same 
manner as the motion of a spinning top by the 
action of a whip upon it. Great as these errors 
may be considered, they are in my opinion as a 
feather in the balance, when compared to the 
prevailing practice of referring to the agency of 
•.hnnical means the various phenomena which 

are 



1?9 

are carried on in the living system ; if the uniform 
rnity of effect which ensues from chemical com* 
binationis contrasted with the diversity of quality 
which different kinds of food undergo by the di- 
gestive power of different animals ; vve must ne- 
cessarily be Jed to conclude that the process of 
digestion does not proceed from a chemical 
cause. If it arose from a chemical cause, the 
change which the food sustained, by the mutual 
action between the parts would be regular and 
uniform, and the result, instead of being always 
the same, would be generally different. It would 
constantly vary in its properties according to 
the specific nature of the substances out of which 
it was made. The change itself would be con- 
stant and definite, and not liable to the remission 
and variation which we witness during the 
process of digestion. 

It is therefore legitimate to conclude that the 
process of digestion, by means of which differ- 
ent kinds of food are assimilated to one and the 
same species, is not a chemical but a living act, 
and that the efficient cause of this commutation 

N 2 does 



180 

does not arise from any active or chemical pro- 
perty which in the food inheres; but that it pro- 
ceeds from the power of the organ alone in which 
it is received, and by whose energy the new 
arrangements of the parts are formed. 

This assimilating power pervades the whole 
range of animated existence. It is in es- 
sence the same in animals as it is in vege- 
tables, however diversified the construction of 
the organs may be by which the effect is pro- 
duced : all these organs are designed to reduce 
different substances to one kind, in order that 
this one substance may be in harmony with the 
system at large, and fitted to be acted upon by 
the particular power of the different organs into 
various forms. When the assimilating organs 
therefore perform their functions with force and 
with efficacy; they possess the power of chang- 
ing and of destroying the sensible and chemical 
qualities of the substance they receive; they not 
only possess the power to act, but to resist ac- 
tion; to change things external to themselves 

without 



131 

withoutbeing changed by external things ; to act 
upon them instead of being converted by them. 

The matter therefore which every living sys- 
tem receives for its nourishment and support, 
can only arise out of its aptitude, and its aptitude 
can only proceed from its imbecillity and weak- 
ness, from its state of disorganization and depri- 
vation total and complete. It is whilst it subsists 
in this weak and destitute condition, with relation 
to the power of a living system, that I say mat- 
ter is a mere tabula rasa — in all its parts a 
chaos, of power and intelligence altogether 
void, as imbecil and inert as the shoe without 
the foot, or as the musical instrument without 
the art or power of the musician: it bears the 
same relation of tvcakness to the poiver of the 
organs, as the uncoloured paper on which I am 
now writing does to the power of my hand, or as 
the block does to the statue. If the block were 
already chiselled into a statue, the prior existence 
of that statue would render the marble whilst in 
that figured condition unfit for the art of the sta- 
tuary, but being a plain surface alone, it becomes 

n 3 a fit 



182 

a fit recipient for the figures which the artist 
intends to engrave. 

That this is the relation which actually sub- 
sists of power and of weakness, between the re- 
ceiver and the thing received, between the or- 
gans and the food ; is proved by examining the 
converse of the proposition. If the food which 
every living system receives for its nourishment , 
and support, acted by virtue of its chemical or 
its sensible qualities, whether of aggregation or 
configuration; whether of colour or flavor ; these 
qualities would constantly resist the powers of 
the organs, and would oppose the change which 
the matter by them was designed to undergo. 
Instead of vegetable and animal matter being 
converted into chyle; fermentation and putre* 
faction would invariably take place; if solid sub- 
stances had been taken in for food, those sub* 
stances would obey the order of their affinities 
in the system itself as they are prone to do out 
of it; a chemical union between the parts would 
take place, and compound salts be formed; and 
finally, if they retained any active or corrosive 

power 



183 

power, they would enter into an union with the 
organ itself, a caustic effect would be produced, 
and a consequent decomposition of it would en- 
sue; or if the matter received acted by virtue of 
its configuration, it would irritate and destroy, 
iaesion and destruction be the consequence. If 
it possessed any permanent power of solidity or 
fluidity; the one could not by the organ be ren- 
dered fluid, more than the other rendered gela- 
tinous or solid, and in neither case could it ul- 
timately be fashioned or formed into the differ- 
ent and varied parts for which it was especially 
designed. 

The same reasoning equally applies to its 
attributes of colour and of flavour also: if any 
particular colour in the food permenantly inhe- 
red, that colour would be constantly retailed; by 
being retained it would be always imparted to 
the blood, and the complexion instead of being 
different in the individual of every species would 
be invariably the same. This is proved when 
substances are introduced for food, whose sen 
sible properties cannot be altogether obliterat 
n 4 ed, 



184 

eel. Hence it is that madder imparts a red, tuv«- 
meric a yellow colour, to the system at large. 
No proof indeed is more strong of the disor- 
ganization total and complete, which the most 
minute particles of matter in general undergo 
by the process of digestion, than the loss of 
flavour and of colour which they suffer ; the most 
odorous and sapid are rendered inodorous and 
tasteless, the most coloured (as far as it is pos- 
sible) colourless; retaining no quality what- 
ever, bulk alone excepted. 

The relation which subsists between the alimen- 
tary matter from without and the digestive organs 
within, is precisely the same in kind as that 
which subsists between the blood and the vari- 
ous parts to which it is conveyed; whilst the 

digestive organs unify and assimilate different 
species of matter to one and the same kind, and 
which subsists in the form of blood, the dif- 
ferent secretory organs on the contrary have the 
power to convert this blood into fluids and 
solids, in their nature totally different, as we 
behold in the various secreted fluids that are 

produced 



185 

produced from the blood of the same animal and 
the medulla of the same plants. Blood bears 
the same relation to the power which the organs 
severally possess, as brick and mortar do to the 
architect or to the artist by whom a building* is 
erected. It has no more the power to convert 
itself into organization or form than brick and 
mortar have of themselves the power to erect a * 
building. If it possessed any power of action 
within itself, by virtue of the sensible properties 
it contains, it would resist the action of the 
organs to which it was applied, it would act 
upon them instead of being changed and con- 
verted by them : if it had the power of convert- 
ing itself by itself either into different organs or 
into different fluids, the previous existence of 
those organs would be unnecessary, since the 
process of conversion and of secretion would 
take place without their influence. We might 
as well suppose that a building can be erected 
without hands and designed without a designer; 
it in fact is to suppose an effect to be produced 
without a producing cause; or the supposition 

equally 



186 

equally absurd and false, that the effect and the 
cause are inherent in one and the same subject. 

By virtue of its passivity the capacity of blood 
arises not only of being moved but of being 
changed and organized; it has the capacity of 
being moved without having any power of mov- 
ing itself, following without resisting the im- 
pulse it receives from the vessels in which it is 
contained. 

It has the capacity of being changed by the 
power of the part in which it is deposited ; yield- 
ing without resisting, as the softened and adapt- 
ed wax to the force of the impression engraved 
on a seal. 

It bears the same relation to the organs as air 
does to sound ; if the air expired from the lungs 
inherently possessed any particular sound, that 
particular sound would constantly manifest it- 
self; but air being destitute of all sound, retains 
the capacity alone of being expanded and com- 
pressed ; it thereby becomes fitted to be acted 

upon 



187 

upon by the organs of speech, and through 
their power it is modulated and harmonized, 
and language ultimately produced. 

It is with a view of preserving this aptitude 
in the blood of animals, and to prevent the sen* 
sible qualities which the coarser parts contain, 
from being employed, or exerting any influ- 
ence upon the organs, that we behold the design 
and end for the exhalent termination of arteries 
into capillary tubes, by means of which a me- 
chanical cause exists to prevent a mechanical 
effect. If it were not for this mode of construc- 
tion; if the terminated diameter of the exhalent 
arteries were large instead of small, not only the 
more tenuous, but the more globular parts of 
the blood would be permitted to flow through ; 
those parts of the whole would flow through 
which possess quantity with colour and figure ; 
quality without aptitude, that would act upon the 
organs instead of retaining the fitness alone to be 
acted upon by them. A gradual diminution in the 
size of the secretory vessels exists, in order that 
the fluid which they exhale may answer in the 

best 



188 

best possible manner the end for which it is de- 
signed; this fluid is therefore tasteless and in- 
odorous, colourless and tenuous. 

So little is known at this time of the nature 
of blood, that with few exceptions, the generali- 
ty of physiologists absolutely deny to it the at- 
tributes of vitality, — of vitality to that important 
matter from which every part of the living sys- 
tem is formed, which supplies the wants, and 
which restores the w r aste that different parts 
suffer ; and Mr. J. Bell, who must be consider- 
ed high authority, calls the vitality of the blood 
" the most monstrous of all absurdities." The 
vitality of the blood is an opinion almost as 
ancient as the Mosaic account of the creation. 
The sacred writings tell us, that " the life is in 
the blood," that is to say that the life of the ani- 
mal or of the vegetable is in the blood, in com- 
mon with the other parts of the body; not sepa- 
rate and distinct from it, but co-existing and 
connate with it. That the blood is alive was 
so considered by Servetus, two hundred and 
fifty years ago, (it made one of the charges pre- 
ferred 



189 

ferred against him before he was brought to the 
stake), as well as by our illustrious countrymen 
Hervey and Hunter. It is greatly to be deplor- 
ed, for the cause of science, that Mr. Hunter's 
active and comprehensive mind should have 
been destitute of those collateral branches of 
knowledge which are intimately connected with 
the science of physiology : he saw truth, but 
he saw it at an unapproachable distance, he 
saw it in a fog, he saw it through a glass dark- 
ly. Although Mr. Hunter revived the explod- 
ed doctrine of the vitality of the blood, he ne- 
vertheless supposed that this vitality was as it 
were separated from the other parts of the sys- 
tem ; that the blood had a life, sui generis, or as 
he termed it, that the blood was an animal with- 
in an animal ; imperium in imperio ; insomuch 
/i^fiHt possessed a sort of animation or power 
of action within itself similar to muscular con- 
traction ; that it was by virtue of this power 
that bones were formed and renewed, and the 
various processes of secretion and of growth 
carried on ; that in fact all the phenomena which 

are 



W6 

are produced by it proceeded from powers inhe- 
rent in it, 

These false assumptions grubed up the road 
which he himself had paved of discovering the 
relation which the blood bears to the organs, 
and at once blasted the fair prospect which he 
had opened to our view, of seeing the nature 
and design of secretion; instead of which the 
process of secretion, so important and exten- 
sive in the living system, is acknowledged by 
all to be involved in utter darkness. 

Our ignorance of secretion appears to me itl 
a great measure to arise from mistaking the re- 
lation which the blood bears to the organs by 
the energy of which it is acted upon and chang- 
ed; instead of considering blood as the passive 
recipient*, as the subject matter to be acted up- 
on, not only by the vessel in which it is con- 
tained, but by the organ in which it is deposit- 
ed ; it is to the stimulus of the blood, more than 
to its aptitude to be acted upon by the organs to 
which the changes which it undergoes are to be 

referred* 



191 

referred. If blood possessed any power of action 
within itself, it would resist the action of the 
organs to which it was applied ; it would act up- 
on them, instead of being* changed and converted 
2^ them ; it is moved without the power of moving 
itself; it is propelled without resisting, and fol- 
lows the impulse it receives from the power of 
the vessels in which it is contained, not accord- 
ing to the principles by which fluids are moved 
in hydraulic machines, but by powers altogether 
different from them. 

The relation which exists between the blood 
and the vessel is precisely the same in kind as 
subsists between the glands and the blood; 
whilst the power of the one is similar to the 
figures engraved in a seal, the other resembles 
the softened and adapted wax which is to re- 
ceive the impression. It is by the energy of the 
former and aptitude in the latter, that the vari- 
ous processes of secretion and nutrition are car- 
ried on. Instead of supposing that the changes 
which are produced on the blood arise from the 
agency of the glands, or of the part in which it 

is 



192 

is deposited, the change for the most part is re- 
ferred to the power of the blood upon the gland, 
the act is stated to he a chemical rather than 
a livin gone, and the aggregating principles of 
physiology have been abandoned to the decom- 
posing powers of chemistry : every solid and 
every fluid have in consequence been analysed 
with the utmost accurac3 r , and from bodies 
whose elements were found to be the same, ef- 
fects which are altogether different are attempt- 
ed to be explained. I shall therefore proceed 
to take a cursory review of these different bodies 
in order to point out how little is known about 
them at this time. 

With respect to saliva, instead of considering 
it as an auxiliary to the teeth in acting upon 
the food; it is for the most part viewed as a 
mere mucous fluid destined to lubricate the 
surface of the mouth. The saliva however to 
me appears to have an higher office to fulfil ; 
whilst the food is broken down with respect to 
mass by the mechanical action of the teeth, the 
saliva is destined to assist them in comminut- 
ing 



193 . 

ing those parts into smaller particles, it tends 
to eliminate the specific and chemical qualities 
which the food contains, it bereaves acids of 
their acidity, alcalis of their acrimony, and to 
a certain and limited extent blunts the asperity 
of both, rendering the different articles of food 
bland and mild, as a preparatory step to the 
action in the stomach which the food is to un- 
dergo. 

The various facts which were produced by 
Mr. Hunter, and which have been multiplied 
without end by others, prove in a manner the 
most decisive that the change which the food 
undergoes in the stomach from a dead to a living 
state, is a living not a chemical act ; although 
all agree that the gastric juice is the agent by 
the energy of which the process is accomplish- 
ed; with the exception of a few, the effect 
is referred to a chemical, not to a living cause: 
with as much rationality might we refer to death 
the cause of life; to organic action, the source 
of organization ; or assert that the fceculent matter 
in the rectum is the seat of chylfication. It is 
o scarcely 



194 

scarcely necessary for me to expatiate on the 
folly of these opinions, they go to revive the ex- 
ploded doctrine of M c Bride, that digestion is 
a process of fermentation and putrifaction, and 
that the same means are employed in the ani- 
mated system to bring dead matter into a living 
state, as those by which living matter is decom- 
posed and reduced to one dead and putrid. 
The gastric juice, like the other fluids, has been 
analysed also, but insead of manifesting any 
chemical properties to which its power can be 
referred, it has been found to be destitute of 
them; it is neither acid nor alcalescent, but per- 
fectly insipid and inoffensive. Is it, I would 
ask, reasonable to assert that a fluid such as 
this, which appears to be destitute of all che- 
mical quality whatever, nevertheless acts by che- 
mical power? 

The same errors exist respecting the agency 
of the means by which a separation of the chy- 
lous from the feculent parts of the chyme is ef- 
fected, after it has passed from the stomach in- 
to the intestinal canal ; although the first por- 
tion of the canal is evidently constructed with a 

view 



195 

view to retard the passage of the chyme through 
it, it is generally believed that the bile which 
the liver secrets is merely intended to accelerate 
its expulsion. It is far otherwise, the internal 
surface of the canal is increased to a very consider- 
able extent by means of a number of ridges or 
folds, which at first are nearly concentric to 
each other but which gradually acquire a diago- 
nal direction ; since then the alimentary canal is 
constructed with a view to retard the motion 
of the food through the first part of its course ; 
it is most unreasonable to suppose that the real 
and direct intention of the hepatic system is to 
hasten its expulsion; if this were the case, in- 
stead of harmony, there would be perpetual 
warfare between both : the retarding construc- 
tion of the intestines would always tend to 
prevent, what the bile was designed to accelerate, 
and the ductus communis, in such a case, instead 
of having its orificein the duodenum ought to have 
it in the rectum; those who can reconcile this war- 
fare of parts that are dependant upon each other, 
have very inadequate notions of the symmetry 
that pervades throughout the whole of the system 

o 2 and 



196 

and the harmony that exists between the parts 
of which it is composed. So far from suppos- 
ing that the primary use of bile is intended to 
defeat the end for which the intestinal (or the 
chylous canal as it ought more properly to be 
called), is so peculiarly constructed; I think it 
far more reasonable to conclude that it is in- 
tended to harmonize with it, and that the bile 
instead of acting by its resin and its alcali as 
an active purgative, is intended in the first in- 
stance to separate the chylous from the fcecu- 
lent parts of the chyme, producing a precipita- 
tion of the one, and afterwards assisting the ex- 
pulsion of the other, conformably to observations 
which have been made by experiments. 

With respect to the pancreas or sweetbread, 
although it secretes a fluid of a quality bland 
and mild, somewhat similar in its properties to 
saliva, and which probably co-operates in ac- 
complishing the same purpose as the bile from 
the liver; the specific determinate use to which 
this fluid subserves, continues to the best ex- 
perimentalist a perfect mystery. 

The 



197 

The same uncertainty prevails respecting the 
use of the spleen $ the well, known fact that it 
has been altogether absent in animals which in 
general have one, and that it has been extirpat- 
ed without producing any violent shock to the 
constitution, led to the supposition that it was 
of little or no use. Dr. Stukely, seventy years 
ago, in his Gulstonian Lecture, traced the con- 
nection which subsists between the spleen and 
the stomach, as well as between the other abdo- 
minal viscera, and from a very scientific mode 
of investigation was led to conclude that the 
spleen was designed to assist the stomach in the 
process of digestion; these opinions of Dr. 
Stukley, have since received some confirmation 
by experiments made by Dr. Haighton, the re- 
spectable lecturer on physiology at Guy's Hos- 
pital ; the doctor was led to conclude that when 
the stomach was full, the pressure which the 
spleen is made in consequence to undergo, not 
only prevents the passage of the blood through 
that organ, but that it actually does produce 
an increased accumulation in the vessels with 
which the stomach and the pancreas are suppli- 
o 3 ed 






198 

ed. Greatly as I respect Dr. Haighton's talents 
and industry, there are many "objections to his 
experiments upon this subject, and the fact that 
in some animals the situation of the stomach 
and the spleen are so remote that they cannot 
come in contact, may probably appear an in- 
superable objection to his hypothesis. Mr. 
Home, who holds the first rank in his profes 
sion, and who must be considered very high 
authority also, from different experiments which 
he made on dogs, is of opinion that the food 
from the stomach undergoes some change in 
the spleen, not through the medium of the ab- 
sorbent vessels, but by some unknown mode of 
communication : after tying the pyloric extre- 
mity of the stomach, and injecting into that or- 
gan infusions of madder and of rhubarb, and 
killing the animal, he found that the cells of the 
spleen, particularly at the great end of it were 
very large and distinct ; on macerating a portion 
of it in ten drachms of water, and testing it by 
an alcali, he found that it gave out a reddish 
brown colour in the center and no where else; 
a similar portion of the liver was treated in the 

same 



199 

same manner and an alkali was added to the 
strained liquor, but no such change in it was 
produced. I mention these opinions in order 
to show how little is known upon the subject. 

The same confusion exists with respect to the 
lacteal (or chilous) vessels ; those vessels which 
arising with open mouths from the folds of the 
intestines, absorb the chyle or digested aliment 
after it has been depurated from its feculent 
portions, and convey it to the mass of blood, in 
order that the waste which it undergoes may be 
restored. The mode by which the absorption 
is accomplished continues an object of disputa- 
tion ; instead of supposing that it is performed by 
a living power in the parts, as much as the suction 
of a leech or even of an infant at the breast ; by 
many it is considered an inanimate act, similar 
to the raising different fluids in narrow tubes, 
by what is called capillary attraction. Al- 
though the lacteal (chylous) resemble the lym- 
phatic vessels in the office of absorption, the 
substances on which they act are in their na- 
ture totally different ; whilst the former convey 
3iU o 4 to 



200 

to the blood the nutritious matter which the 
stomach had assimilated ; the latter on the con- 
trary are designed to remove and carry away 
those parts of the system which are worn out, 
and which exist in a perishing and dying state ; 
the former maybe compared to cooks which con- 
stantly afford to the blood a supply, the other 
to scavengers who take away the dilapidated 
parts of the system. It is in obedience to the 
diversity in the end to which each system is 
subservient, that there exists a diversity of power 
between them at different periods of life; in in- 
fancy and youth, whilst the system is in a state 
of progression and growth the lacteals are large 
and the lymphatics comparatively small ; at the 
middle periods of life, when the system has at- 
tained the acme of perfection, both systems are 
as it were balanced; in old age, on the con 
trary, when emaciation and decrease takes 
place, the balance between them is altogether 
upset, and both scales are put into one; the 
lacteals become weaker and smaller, whilst the 
lymphatics on the contrary increase in magni- 
tude and strength. Instead of contemplating 

the 



201 

the action of these vessels with relation to the 
separate functions which they are designed to 
perform, both are generally confounded together, 
whilst the former carry materials to the blood 
to supply the waste which it suffers, the latter 
receives from the system the parts which are 
wasted, or which have accomplished the purpose 
for which they were enlarged ; in no organ is this 
office more striking than in the uterus. Before ges- 
tation the lymphatics of that organ are remark- 
ably small and thready, after parturition they im- 
mediately encrease in size, and have often been 
seen as large as the quill of a goose; it is 
through their agency that the different parts of 
the system that are either superfluous or dis- 
eased are removed ; diminishing the fabric of the 
whole by the parts which they absorb, and of* 
ten destroying the form itself; notwithstanding 
these avowed purposes for which the lymphatics 
are designed, the opinion which was first broach- 
ed by Mr. Hunter, soon after they were discover- 
ed, that they were the modellers of our frame 

continues 



202 

continues to be preserved; instead of modellers 
they are the scavengers of the system.* 

If I proceed to detail the opinions which are 
entertained respecting the function of the lungs, 
they will be found most erroneous and contra- 
dictory. Instead of considering the lungs, as I 
conceive they ought to be considered, as much 
organs of digestion as the stomach itself; the 
one acting upon and digesting particular kind* 
of air, as much as the other is known to do 
particular kinds of food, whilst the latter re- 
stores the waste which the blood sustains in point 
of quantity, the former meliorates it in point of 
quality, and by the united power of both it is 
preserved in a state fitted to answer the ends for 
which it is designed ; instead, however of sup- 
posing that the lungs act upon the air, it is sup- 
posed it is the air which acts upon the lungs, 

* The pig which had remained under the ruins of the cliff 
which fell in at Dover, for the period of five months, was re- 
duced in weight by the. activity of these vessels, for the 
most part, from eight scores to thirty six pound} that is he had 
lost in weight 124 pounds. 

and 



203 

and like the action of the food upon the stomach, 
that it is a chemical, not a living act. 

Instead of separating the functions of respira- 
tion in general, as they ought tobe,into inspiration 
by which air is received into the lungs — into 
digestion, by which particular portions of it are 
separated from the rest, and received into the 
blood for its melioration and support, and final- 
ly into expiration, by which the residuary and 
fceculent parts are expelied out of the system : 
the process of respiration, on the contrary, is 
confined to inspiration and expiration only. I 
shall not dwell upon the multitude of cruel ex- 
periments which have been made on cats and 
dogs, in order to ascertain the quality of the 
different materials which are received and ex- 
pelled : in spight of all the means which have 
been employed these chemical physiologists 
continue at variance, and have not yet settled 
whether oxygen air or caloric is absorbed, and 
from the late experiments made without the aid 
of torture, by two eminent chemists, Messrs. 
Allen and Pepys, upon this subject, they would 

seem 



204 

seem to disprove all the experiments that have 
been made before; they go to show that al- 
though much carbonic air is expired, little or 
nothing is taken in ; however high the authority 
certainly is, from whence this opinion has come. 
I nevertheless consider the actual change of 
colour and of consistence, from black and thick 
to red and liquid, which the blood undergoes 
as it passes from the pulmonary artery through 
the lungs to the pulmonary veins, is far more 
decisive than any chemical experiments per- 
formed on the air out of the body can disprove; 
that independently of what is expelled a con- 
siderable quantity of matter is neverthless re- 
ceived, the quality of which it is not worth a 
rush to ascertain ; the experiments made by 
Mr. Hunter, Dr. Goodwin, &c. &c. are decisive 
on this point. 

Equally at variance are physiologists with 
respect to the manner in which the matter act- 
ed upon by the lungs is conveyed into the blood : 
instead of deriving benefit from the analogy which 
different parts of the system afford, when we 

see 



205 

see the matter which is received, is conveyed by 
absorption from vessels which have the power 
of absorbing ; instead of supposing that the 
parts of the air which have been separated frorn 
the whole, are absorbed by the extremity of the 
pulmonary veins, as the nutritious matter which 
the placenta furnishes for the support of the 
foetus is unquestionably absorbed by the extre- 
mities of the umbilical veins, or as the chyle by 
the chylous (lacteal) vessels, it is generally 
supposed that the air forces its way into the 
blood by the most unnatural means, not through 
the medium of open orifices which are greedy to 
receive it, but through the solid and impeni- 
trable sides of the vessels themselves. A con- 
struction of vessels which would permit the 
access of air through would evidently admit the 
egress of it also ; the assertion has been disprov- 
ed by experiments which were made to support 
it ; the jugular veins of rabbits have been ex- 
posed and oxygen air by means of a blow pipe, 
has been directed upon it, without producing 
any sensible alteration on the blood that flowed 
through it; on removing, however, the external 

coat 



206 

coat of the vessel it was supposed that the co- 
lour of the blood then underwent some change, 
and became more florid than before : a false fact 
such as this, will not 1 trust give any weight to 
such an opinion. 

Although chemical physiologists have been 
undecided with respect to the quality of the 
matter which has been received from the lungs 
into the blood, they have been pretty unani- 
mous in opinion, that it was the source and the 
cause of animal heat. If such an hypothesis 
were true it must as a consequence follow that the 
temperature of the blood must be higher at the 
the point near which it is received than in the 
most remote parts from it; and that the blood 
on the left side of the heart ought, in that case, 
to be hotter than the blood on the right side of 
it : the fact however is precisely the reverse, 
the experiments made by Mr. A. Cooper (and 
there is no man more able or more to be de- 
pended upon), shew in a manner the most de- 
cisive that the blood on the right side of the 
heart, at the greatest possible distance from 

whence 



207 

whence the matter of heat is supposed to be re- 
ceived, was from two to three degrees hotter than 
the blood on the left side, the nearest point to 
the supposed source of heat; if the hypothesis 
therefore is admitted to be true we must also 
admit the absurdity, that a body is heated to a 
greater degree when situated at a great distance 
from a fire than when it is placed close to it. 

How the gaseous matter received from the 
lungs acts upon the blood, except by changing 
its colour and consistency, is as unknown at 
present as the operation of medicine upon the 
stomach. The causa operandi of medicine is 
altogether unknown, and the modus operandi is 
only acquired by experience obtained through 
the medium of observation and of accident; the 
best physician that exists can no more tell the 
cause why tartarized antimony has an emetic, or 
the sulphate of magnesia a cathartic effect, than 
the most ignorant nurse living ; much less (if 
total ignorance would admit of degrees), how 
specific* remedies produce specific effects in 
curing particular complaints : let it not there- 
fore 



208 

fore be arrogantly asserted that there is any 
science in pathology, or in the practice of medi- 
cine, it is absolute quackery.* 

Having run over the deplorable state of igno- 
rance which exists respecting the functions of 
those organs that are subservient to the pre- 
servation and support of the system, I shall now 
proceed to show that the same state of error and 
of ignorance exists respecting the nature of the 
actions of those organs, through the energy of 

* I wish however to be clearly understood ; I speak of the 
practice of medicine as a science, not as an art. The observa- 
tions and experience of intelligent and sensible men have been 
the means of employing the different remedies which relieve and 
cure different complaints, and the man who has the greatest ex- 
perience, and who has the best capacity to make observation on 
the progress of the different symptoms of the same disease, and 
to compare different diseases with each other is unquestionably 
the. man who is most likely to constitute the best physician. 
With respect to surgery there is perhaps no branch of art that 
has undergone within the last thirty years greater improvements 
not only with respect to the instruments employed, but in the 
mode of using them also; and the sufferings of mankind have in 
consequence been greatly mitigated ; these observations may in 
some degree apply to the art of midwifery also. 

which 



209 

Which the ends are obtained for which animat- 
ed beings were created; I mean the organs of 
motion and of fecundation, of ratiocination and 
of sensation* 



With respect to the cause of motion although 
the subject has occupied the attention of many 
ingenious and enquiring men at different times, 
we possess no other knowledge of this cause 
than that the muscles are the agents by which 
motion is produced ; but of the cause why we 
continue in the most profound ignorance. 

Having investigated the subject of fecunda- 
tion, the result of which I have detailed at large 
in my Physiology, as well as in two papers pub- 
lished in the MedicalJournal for the year 1799, 
I shall merely observe in this place, that the ob- 
ject which I had principally in view, was to shew 
thatthe ideas which were entertained on it by Dr. 
Haighton, and which have been published in the 
Philosophical Transactions, were altogether er- 
roneous ; that he had discarded and rejected all 
analogy whatever; and the evidence which is 

p furnished 



210 

furnished to us by vegetables, by fish, and 
by the amphibia, as well as other classes of 
animals; that instead of taking* the actual 
existence of a foetus, as constituting the only 
infallible test of animal impregnation; he had 
assumed the formation of a corpus luteum in 
the ovarium. I proved that the very facts which 
he had advanced were decisive in shewing 
that he had proceeded from false assumptions ; 
that in all those cases in which he divided the 
fallopian tube of one side and left the one on the 
opposite side perfect and undivided, that al- 
though there were corpora lutea in both ovaria; 
there were foetuses only in the perfect, but no 
traces whatever of a foetus in the mutilated side ; 
that although (Estrumhad producedan evolution 
of the ova in both ovaria,impregnation was appa- 
rent only in the perfect one. Notwithstanding these 
facts which he himself had obtained, he conclud- 
ed that the existence of corpora lutea was the test 
of impregnation ; and from this false fact and 
false assumption, he has proceeded to investi- 
gate the subject, and to make from them the 
most erroneous conclusions; he might with as 
much propriety have supposed that the ova of 

birds 



birds, which we see continually dropped from the 
ovarium without impregnation, are actually im- 
pregnated ; and that the corpus luteum which 
is in consequence formed, is the test of it, al- 
though certain evidence had existed that no 
union between the pairs had taken place, and 
where corpora lutea had been formed, but no im- 
pregnation whatever. 

The ignorance and error which exist respect- 
ing the functions which I have mentioned, are 
especially extended to those of sensation and of 
consciousness ; although the brain is the organ 
in which consciousness resides, we are totally 
ignorant of the manner by which its actions are 
displayed ; how it is that without being muscular 
in its fabric it is nevertheless the cause of muscular 
motion; how, though formed of parts which 
were originally destitute of sense and of reason, 
it nevertheless constitutes the instrument from 
which the principles of sense and of reason per- 
tually flow. Notwithstanding all analogy justifies 
the opinion that the brain is an organ of secretion, 
the fact has never been demons traced, and the most 
perfect ignorance exists at thi s time how this most 
p 2 important 



212 

important organ of the whole system acts, and 
what is its nature. This state of ignorance has 
been very candidly confessed by Sir Busic Har- 
wood, the present learned and respectable pro- 
fessor of anatomy at the university of Cam- 
bridge : — 

"When we dissect the brain," sayshe, "and ob- 
serve the different substances of which it is com- 
posed, and their different forms ; imagination as- 
suming the office of reason, would willingly assign 
a peculiar use to every part, and pronounce one 
to be the residence, or rather the instrument of 
memory ; another of abstraction, a third of vo- 
lition, &c. When a sensation is excited by the 
action of any substance upon the'body, we im- 
mediately perceive upon what part of the body 
the substance acts, where the impression be- 
gins ; and as the impression is conveyed by the 
nerves to the brain, it is conceivable that we 
might be so constituted as to perceive with the 
same facility in what part of the brain the im- 
pression ends. This, however, experience con- 
vinces tis, we are not able to determine. The 

skill 



213 

skill of the anatomist has demonstrated every 
process, explored every cavity, and would if 
possible have traced every filament of this in- 
explicable mass, of that wonderful aud anoma- 
lous organ placed on the doubtful confines of 
the material and spiritual worlds I nor have the 
physiologist or metaphysician been less eager to 
discover or to assign to each part its peculiar 
office; whatever maybe due to the former for 
accuracy, and to the latter for ingenuity and 
zeal, we must lament that little knowledge has 
resulted from their labours. At this advanced 
period of science, when almost every subject 
has been illuminated by the experiments, the 
deductions, and even by the conjectures of the 
learned, we are not able to proceed a single 
step beyond the fathers of medicine, who in the 
very infancy of our art pronounced this inscru- 
table mass of organized matter to be the foun- 
tain and the reservoir, the beginning and the 
end of the whole nervous system, where every 
idea originates, and to which every sensation is 
referred/' 

P a The 



214 

The same want of knowledge exists with 
respect to sensation, — that the nerves are the 
organs of sense as the muscles are of motion, 
comprehends all we know of their nature; 
but of the manner how impressions received are 
conveyed to the brain, in which the impression 
ends and consciousness begins ; and how voli- 
tion and motion are imparted to the different 
muscles of voluntary motion, — whether these ef- 
fects are accomplished through the medium of 
a subtle fluid which the nerves contain, as Sir 
Isaac Newton and others with great probability 
of truth have asserted, or according to the opi- 
nion of others by vibrations excited through 
nerves of a solid fabric, like thrills on a brass 
wire, is not only a matter of hypothesis, but is 
as unknown to the best physiologist, as it is to 
the rudest barbarian.* 



■* The horrid cruelties which continue to be practised by the 
Galvanic fire, and other means, on the sciatic nerves of frogs, 
rather favour the former hypothesis ; the experiment once made 
has ascertained all that can be known from it, and the fact 
might therefore be mentioned, but certainly ought not to be re- 
peated as it is so often done, in order to produce a sort of stage 

What 



215 

What are the individual properties of which the 
different bodies are composed, which impressed 
upon the organs of sense excite the different sensa- 
tions, is a physical not a physiological question, 
and is more cognizable to the natural philosopher 
than to the physiologist. 

It is the province of the chemist to analize the 
materials of which the different kinds of food are 
composed, to ascertain the parts which consti- 
tute the difference by which one species of food 
is in its nature different from the rest; — beef 
from venison, madeira from claret. What are 
the constituent materials which flowing from 
different bodies excite on the olfactory sense, 
flavours so various and opposite, — to ascertain 
the quality of bodies through which impulses 
are propagated, and which excite on the audi- 
tory nerves the sensations of sound, — or why abed 
of roses and a bed of thorns, excite the sensa- 
tions of pleasure and of pain ; — to ascertain the 

effect, and to gratify ignorant curiosity. Little did Lord Bacon 
suppose that the system 6i induction which he introduced, would 
have been converted into a system of torture. 

p 4 nature 



216 

nature of the atmosphere in general, as well as 
of the different bodies which excite upon the 
nerves of sense the sensation of dryness and of 
moisture, of heat and of cold ; to separate the 
matter which excites the sensation of heat and 
of cold, from such as excites the sensation 
of colour; — to prove what fire is, as Mell as 
ice. It is the duty of the chemist to analize the 
materials which flowing from different bodies 
excite upon the eye the sensation of illumination 
in general, and of colour in particular ; not only 
to segregate a beam of light into rays, but to 
analize each ray into its constituent parts; to 
separate the matter of colour from the matter 
of light \ and finally to present the solar ray 
pure and unmixed as it subsists in its elemen- 
tary and uncombined state. Until ready and 
most satisfactory answers can be given to these 
points, I shall consider chemistry most defective 
and imperfect, undeserving the name of science, 
and merely ranking on a level with other arts.* 

• I purposely omit noticing the analysis of any part of the 
Jiving system, whether of animals or of vegetables; because che* 

The 



217 

The sensation on the surface of the body is ex* 
cited by the resistance which is opposed to the 
nerves situated under the skin, the nature and 
the design of which depend on the peculiarity 
in the arrangment of the particles of the exter- 
nal substances; it is from that peculiarity that 
we decide whether a body is solid or fluid, — - 
whether it be rough or smooth, blunt or sharp. 

In the organs of hearing, sound in general is 
excited by impressions on the auditory nerves, 
through the medium of the tympanum, and it is 
owing to the various undulations of the air, mo- 
dified and altered by the organization of the ex- 
ternal fabric of the ear, that sound in general is 
made sound particular, sound particular mani- 
fested by the variety of tones so distinctly per- 
ceived by those who have what is called a good 



mieal analysis, of any portion of it, can only be accomplished 
after death; and consequently during the life of the system the 
excretions only are the parts with which the chemist may 
amuse himself in examining. 



ear. 



218 

ear. In the organ of hearing sound may be 
considered the genus, tones the species. 

In the organ of smelling the sensation of 
odour is excited by the particles of bodies which 
are applied to the olfactory nerves through the 
medium of the scneiderian membrane : odour in 
general is the genus, the quality of those odours 
the species, whether aromatic or fetid. 

In the organs of taste, the sensation of flavour 
is excited by the different substances more es- 
pecially received for food, and which are appli- 
ed to the nerves of the tongue ; whilst flavour 
in general constitutes the genus, the variety of 
sensations which different kinds of food pro- 
duce constitute the species. 

In the organ of vision the rays of light im- 
pressed on the retina of the eye excite the sen- 
sation of illumination in general, and like dif- 
ferent articles of food which excite different fla- 
vours, different bodies conveyed to the eye 

produce 



219 

produce different colours. In vision illumina- 
tion is the genus, of which colours are the spe- 
cies ; every substance therefore in nature which 
exists, of which the eye has any cognizance 
whatever, whether it be black or white, brown 
or yellow, or in short whatever colour or ap- 
pearance it may assume, must be considered, 
to be coloured. However ignorant we may be 
of the proximate cause of sensation, we are cer- 
tain only of the fact itself, and that it does not exist 
in the external substance by which the impres- 
sion is made, but in the living and sensitive prin 
ciple alone by which the impression is received. 
In the investigation of the doctrine of sensation the 
question is not, as I have before detailed, whe- 
ther sensation abides in bodies external to the 
living system, but what are the bodies which 
convey impressions upon the organs of sense in 
general by means of which sensations are ex- 
cited and produced. 

® Vide Chap. 3, p. 53. Part I. 

Had 



220 

Had physiologists and chemists been properly 
informed of the distinction which exists between 
impression and sensation — between the thing re- 
ceived and the receiver, between the substance 
without and the sensitive principle within, we 
should have been spared thepain of hearing opini- 
ons promulgated and taught by those few, very few 
individuals, who lay down the law, and who 
have been deluding the world for some cen- 
turies past down to the present moment, — we 
should have been spared the folly of being call- 
ed upon to believe opinions that are not more 
revolting to the feelings than they are to the 
good, common unsophisticated sense and ap- 
prehension of mankind, — amongst a multitude 
of other things equally erroneous, 

1. That matter in general, instead of being 
essentially different is actually of the same na- 
ture ; that instead of being separable into solid, 
liquid, and gaseous, that on the contrary the 
primary particles of matter are essentially solid 
and massy. 

2dly. 



221 

2dly. That instead of these particles being 
penetrable and permeable, as we behold them 
to be, not only to the active powers of life and 
of sensibility, — of light and of fire, as well as of a 
variety of other chemical agents ; it is absolutely 
affirmed, that the softest bodies are equally 
solid with the hardest, and all essentially impe- 
netrable. 

3dly. That notwithstanding this pretended 
impenetrable and impermeable quality inherent 
in the primary particles of matter, they ne- 
vertheless possess powers of attraction in pro- 
portion to their quantity ; that one mass of mat- 
ter by virtue of this power acts upon another 
mass, and both upon each other, not only by 
immediate contact, but independently of it, not 
only where it is, but where it is not ; — that these 
imaginary powers subsisting as causes produce 
effects at themost remote parts of the solar system 
that can be conceived, which effects are mani- 
fested by the motions which the different planets 
display, of which that system is composed, — as 
well might it be affirmed, that something might 

be 



222 

be produced out of nothing, as to say, that a 
body can act where it is not. 

4thly. Instead of considering the liquid 
which covers to an unfathomable depth two-thirds 
of the surface of the earth, exclusive of what 
constitutes rivers and lakes, and which is kept 
suspended in the firmament above in the form 
of atmosphere and clouds, and known by the 
name of ivater, to be the base and fountain of fluid- 
ity in general, it is on the contrary supposed 
that this immense ocean is formed by, and is an 
effect produced by the combined union of two 
factitious airs, each of which are more than 
nine hundred degrees rarer than the same given 
bulk of water. # 



* The universal admission of this hypothesis is only a fur* 
ther proof of the little philosophy which exists with our expe- 
rimentalists, and how liable they are to draw false conclusions 
from the facts they behold. If this hypothesis were admitted, it 
would go to the absurdity of supposing that the effect is greater 
than the cause. The experiment upon which this opinion is 
founded only goes to prove, that although water can be con- 
verted into gas by the agency of certain powers, and that by ihe 
substraction of those powers water is reproduced ; in the same 
manner as by the agency of fire water can be converted into ste;» m,and 

Instead 



223 

5thly. Instead of supposing that the atmos- 
phere acts like other gaseous bodies (under equal 
degrees of external influence) by the attributes of 
expansibility which are inherent in them equally 
in every direction, it is universally supposed 
that the pressure of the atmosphere upon the 
earth, and upon every thing by which its sur- 
face is covered, is the pressure of gravity or of 
weight; that the weight and perpendicular pres- 
sure of the atmosphere is in the proportion of 
15 lbs. to every square inch of surface; and as 
every square foot contains 144 square inches, 
these must consequently sustain the pressure of 
21801b. weight. Supposing, therefore, that a 
man in an erect posture, taking one part with 
another, is commensurate to a square of 16 in- 
ches, it must in that case follow, that the per- 
pendicular pressure upon him is equal in weight 
to 2880 lb. But, alas ! if he happens to have a 
broad brimmed hat, a parasol to keep off the sun, 
or a parapluis to shelter him from the rain, the 

by the substraction of fire water again formed; as well into a 
solid form as we see it in ice and snow by certain changes which 
it is the duty of the chemist to discover, but of which he does 
not as yet appear to have any knowledge. 

weight 



224 

weight must in that case be as great as it is 
when he is in a recumbent position, and when 
the superficies of his body may be consequently 
supposed encreased to a square of four feet at 
least; the weight in that case must be equal to 
11520 lb. ; and if the composition is further ex^ 
tended, by adding the lateral and circumambient 
pressure, which is supposed to be more than 
double, the latter sum it is affirmed (and 
very justly affirmed if the position was true 
from whence these conclusions are drawn) that 
in a man of about six feet high, and of the 
usual bulk, the extent of surface being at least 
sixteen feet, he must sustain a weight in every 
direction of 30720 lbs. or more than sixteen tons 
weight for his ordinary load ! ! ! 

6thly. Instead of supposing that the colouring 
quality of matter abides in the body from whence 
it flows, like every other quality which causes 
impressions upon the other organs of sense, it 
is absolutely affirmed, and universally believed > 
that the colour of a body proceeds from what 
the body does not possess ; instead of arising 

from 



225 

fromraysofcolourwhichissueoutofitexciting up- 
on the optic sense, particular sensations to which 
the names of particular colours have been given, 
it is supposed that the colour of every body pro- 
ceeds from rays of colour which were never ad- 
mitted within it ; but that are repelled from 
it; and that a white body is white because 
it reflects all the rays but absorbs none; 
and a black body is black because it ab- 
sorbs all the rays and reflects none ; it is there- 
fore concluded that neither black or white are 
colours. I would, however, ask any of these 
worthies to tell me whether the matter by which 
the sensation of white or of black is excited is 
not as actual and potential as that by which the 
sensation of red or of green, &c. &c. and whe* 
ther snow and jet have not an actual existence, 
as certainly as gold and indigo. 

7thly. Instead of supposing that the quality of 
matter by which the sensation oicold is produced 
is as absolute as the quality of matter by which 
the sensation of heat is excited, it is on the con- 
trary universally affirmed and believed that cold 
is a negative not a positive property ; that during 
the winter season of the year, when we behold 
fluids converted into a solid form, water be- 
come ice, vegetation suspended, animation of- 

q ten 



226 

ten rendered torpid and destroyed by mortifi- 
cation ; — although these effects are produced by 
that modification of matter called cold, it may 
perhaps appear somewhat strange to men of 
common feelings, who possess common sense, 
that the actual existence of the matter of cold 
instead of being admitted should be denied by 
all the most enlightened chemists and experi- 
mental philosophers as they call themselves, of 
the present day ; — and that none but ignorant 
fools, if any there are so foolish dare to 
think otherwise; that the effects which are 
produced in the polar regions, as well as 
in other countries during the winter do not 
proceed from the matter of cold but that 
they arise from the privation of heat; as if 
snow or ice applied to bodies in which those 
effects take place, have not an actual exist- 
ence, as much as a flame of fire by the im- 
pressions from which the sensation of heat is ex- 
cited and combustion produced. 

8thly. Although the tops of the most lofty moun- 
tains, at all degrees of latitude from the equator to 
the poles, are uniformly and everlastingly cover- 
ed with snow and ice, and the sensation of cold 
so excessive that neither man or beast are cap- 
able of supporting its influence : it is nevertheless 

generally 



227 

generally believed that the sun is a globe ofjire, 
that is to say, that the purer the medium through 
which the intensity of the fire ought to be most 
felt, and the nearer it is approached, the colder 
it will feel. 

9thly. That fire is capable of existing in two 
separate states, in a sensible and in a latent state; 
in the one exciting the sensation of heat to ani- 
mated beings, and expansion to the medium by 
which it is contained; in the other state it nei- 
ther produces heat or expansion. 

lOthly. Although every fact which we pos- 
sess goes to prove that every particle of fire 
belonging to our system is repellent and expan- 
sible, — imponderable and destitute of gravity or 
weight; it is nevertheless believed that it is by 
the attraction of gravitation that the different 
heavenly bodies are dragged and pulled down 
by the sun, a globe of repellent fire, as the at- 
tracting centre of the whole solar system. 

llthly. That although rare bodies have as 
great a tendency to rise as dense bodies to fall, 
and that the gravity of one body is consequently 
relative to the levity of another; although these 
facts are universally true, the fourth law of the 
Newtonian philosophy is nevertheless founded in 

direct 



228 

direct violation of them, viz. that all bodies are 
mutually heavy or gravitate towards each other ! 

12thly. And finally, it is concluded that a 
cart which is of itself essentially passive, and 
only offers resistance to an external force, never- 
less draws the horse as much as the horse draws 
the cart; that is to say that the effect produced 
by a passive body is equal to the effect produced 
by one which is active : and from this false as- 
sumption is founded the third grand and gene- 
ral law of nature, which is supposed in a great 
measure to regulate the whole planetary system 
viz. that re-action is always equal and contrary 
to action. 

However obnoxious or ridiculous I may ap- 
pear for disbelieving what to me is contrary to 
common sense and common apprehension, al- 
though sanctioned by the greatest authorities 
and universal acquiescence, I shall neverthe- 
less give it my veto, and shall, at a future op- 
portunity, shew that the assumption of these 
false facts for principles, have led to the greatest 
errors in the science of physics that can be 
conceived. fi ^ 4 '% 

END OF THE FIRST PART. 

Plummer and Brewis, Printers, Love Laus, Little £s»tcheap. 



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